[Mapserver-dev] virtualising attribute data

[Attila Csipa]

I was thinking about the possibilities of virtualising attribute data for my 
needs, meaning that for example a layer that has spatial data in a shapefile 
has the attribute data in plain mysql (this is how it works in my prototype 
test and happens to be the most requested feature that I got). Note that this 
is _not_ the same as doing a join and not like using virtualspatialogr. I'd 
like to hear if anyone has some ideas or thoughts on this. Obviously with 
some layer types it is much harder or impossible to separate the spatial from 
the attribute data, and the easiest route would be to perhaps make a 
virtualxbase DBF handler, but this is not a universal solution even though 
this is what I think the great majority of users would use it for - using 
spatial data from SHP files with attributes from DBF/mysql/postgre/odbc/etc.