Example Technical Committee Proposal...

[Bill Binko]

On Wed, 13 Jul 2005, Steve Lime wrote:

> A real proposal, sample proposal template...
> 

Steve, since your sample is simple text, could we make the standard a 
simple text file?  That would enable those without M$ Word to play.

I've attached a text version.

Bill
-------------- next part --------------
Proposal Title: Creating inline features and/or shapes using WKT.
Version: 1.0

Author: Steve Lime
Date: 7/13/2005

Description: Developing inline features or shapes within MapScript can be a bit cumbersome.  One alternative would be to allow users to define feature using the Well-Known Text format.  The proposed solution would allow users to use this format:

1) within a mapfile
2) via URL
3) via MapScript

Instead of writing a new WKT parser I would provide access to underlying GEOS functionality to do this and leverage the Geometry <=> shapeObj wrapper code that is already available.

Files affected:

- mapfile.h => new constant
- maplexer.l => recognize the new constant
- mapfile.c => process new mapfile parameter with FEATURE block (WKT), and update URL parsing in a similar manner
- mapgeos.cpp => wrap GEOS WKT reading code
- mapscript/swiginc/shape.i => update constructor to pass a WKT string

Backwards compatabilty issue: N/A, new functionality

Implementation Issues:  Biggest problem may lie with MapScript and how to integrate into the shapeObj code. Ideally one would just create an overloaded shapeObj constuctor. It.s not clear how cross-language that would be although both Perl and Python support that via SWIG. Not sure about other SWIGed languages or PHP.  Could also consider adding a method like .addWKT. to the layer object.

Bug ID: unassigned

Voting history: