[Mapserver-dev] WMS: nested groups

[Silke Reimer]

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Hallo!

We are working on a project where we need nested layers in more than
one level within a WMS server.

Currently the WMS implementation of the UMN MapServers allows one
grouping level by assigning a group to several layers. The groupname
then appears as nested layer into the Capabilities-Document.

I thought of a possibility how to enhance the UMN MapServer to allow
more than one grouping level and came to the idea to add a new layer
type, named 'grouplayer' which is only a virtual layer. Such I can
define a full tree of nested layers (see example below).

I made a first implementation of this feature by:
- including the grouplayer keyword
- adapting the creation of the Capabilities document.

You can find the corresponding patch on [1].

I would like to have some feedback from your side whether you think
that this is sensible. Furthermore there are still a few open
issues:
- what is about nested layers of the wfs and wcs? Probably this code
  has to be adapted as well (this has not been important for my
  implementation so I left it out so far).
- I left layers at grouping level without a name, only providing a
  title. The title is mandatory while the name is optional meaning
  that each layer that has a name can be drawn by providing this
name.
  For grouplayers this means that all sublayers will be drawn
  automatically. Since the mapserver core has not been designed to
  deal with this feature I decided to ignore the layers name at this
  point.

Many greetings,

        Silke

[1] http://ftp.intevation.de/users/silke/mapserver/mapserver-4.2-group.patch

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Silke Reimer

Intevation GmbH                      http://intevation.de/
FreeGIS                                http://freegis.org/


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