[Mapserver-dev] Generic tiling (for shapefiles and rasters)...

[Daniel Morissette]

Steve Lime wrote:
> 
> The modifications I'm talking about should have no effect on file-based
> versus directory-based access. The location (or TILEITEM) contents are
> applied to the layer that is tiled regardless of the where the tileindex
> is defined. Your old mapfile would still work. You could re-write as
> 
> LAYER
>   NAME tiger-tile
>   DATA tiger-tile
> END
> LAYER
>    TILEINDEX "tiger-tile"
>    DATA "roads"
> END
> LAYER
>   TILEINDEX "tiger-tile"
>   DATA "waterpoly"
> END
> 

I think I remember reading something about this but didn't realize that 
you were moving ahead with this approach.  I would like to raise the 
backwards compatibility flag since TILEINDEX would now be the name of a 
tile layer instead of the path to a shapefile.

Perhaps something we could do to remain backwards compatible is that if 
a layer by the specified name exists then it is used as tile index. And 
if no layer with the specified name exists then the TILEINDEX value is 
assumed to be a shapefile like in older version and a tileindex layer 
would be implicitly defined for it by the parser.

Would this dual behavior be just too complicated to understand for 
users?  Should we consider creating a new keyword for the tile index 
layer reference instead?


Oh, and another note: we'll probably need a new status flag or layer 
type (e.g. MS_LAYER_TILEINDEX) to indicate that the tile layer is not a 
real layer and shouldn't show up in WMS/WFS capabilities, or in user 
interfaces produced by MapScript apps.

Daniel
-- 
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  Daniel Morissette               dmorissette at dmsolutions.ca
  DM Solutions Group              http://www.dmsolutions.ca/
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