[Mapserver-dev] hierarchical map files

bertelli bertelli at charta.acme.com
Sun Sep 5 11:52:50 EDT 2004


Ciao,

thanks for the HOWTO on building map files via make and also about qgis. I
like it, I use it on Linux, I would use it even in Mac OS X if it only had
some point/polygon editing capabilities and some sort of spatial sql
interface. I understand from your words that you are involved in that
project.  It's a very interesting approach with unexpectedly easy and
effective results.

About the maing subject, hierarchical map files, i posted it on mapserver-dev
to say that this is not only a user's level question, it's a problem.
When you maintain more than 10 projects on MapServer you have to have a
simple and effective way to handle any upgrade in base maps.

It's not a problem of generating a map file, this is easy and logical, it has
a clear structure from start-up (thanks Steve), but when you have to upgrade
a piece of a map you have to alter a mapfile for every single application,
maybe more, if you use maxscale/minscale mapfiles.

Compiling a new map file via make o via a query, as I suggested, it's not an
issue. You still have to be sure you changed all your mapfiles (I have more
than 15 mapfiles working and they continue to break and to be fixed, but this
is a bad effort).

Is there someone in the list that thinks I'm right? Should I file an
enhancement bug?

Carlo

Carlo

--- Titus von der Malsburg <malsburg at cl.uni-heidelberg.de> ha scritto:
> On Fri, Sep 03, 2004 at 04:52:42PM +0000, bertelli wrote:
> > thank you very much for your suggestion. I'm not very good at setting up
> > make, so, if you send me some sample file it would save a lot of time.
> 
> I'll outline it in a litte HOWTO document and post it on
> this list later this weekend.
> 
> > BTW, I was planning a somehow similar approach, putting every information
> > about layers inside a table in a database and generating the mapfile with
> a
> > query, but I think hierarchical map files make sense.
> 
> You are right, maybe make/cpp is not everyones taste.  But do you know
> QuantumGIS (http://qgis.org)?  It's a quite nice clone of ArcView and
> has the ability to export mapfiles and could therefore be used as a
> WYSIWYG editor for Mapserver maps.  The exporter is incomplete in the
> current version, but the code is very readable and straightforward.  It
> should be very easy to round it out, I guess.
> 
> Maybe I will have the time to work on it in the next weeks -- maybe
> someone else on this list is interested in working on it?
> 
> 	Titus




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