server-side SLD support

[Bart van den Eijnden (OSGIS)]

Hi list,

I am talking to Assefa about getting Mapserver to support SLD documents
server-side, and he said it might be good to start some discussion on the
dev list. Quite some Web Map Services have this capability (Geoserver,
Ionic), and it will make exchanging configuration between those environments
and Mapserver easier.

Note:

* most the code is already in place
* Mapserver does support SLD in its WMS client

Our plan is to add server-side SLD support to Mapserver WMS. This would
involve adding a new keyword, for instance STYLEDLAYERDESCRIPTOR. It will
add classes from the SLD document (matching the layer's name) to the LAYER.

Example:

LAYER
  NAME "test"
  ..
  CLASS
    NAME "myfirstclass"
    .. 
  END
  STYLEDLAYERDESCRIPTOR "/data/geoservices/nis/sld/nis/nis.sld"
  CLASS
    NAME "mylastclass"
    ..
  END
  ..
END

If the LAYER already has classes, the classes will be inserted/added
depending on the sequence of the keywords. So in the above example the
classes generated from the SLD will be appended after "myfirstclass" but
inserted before "mylastclass".

Are there any objections against this? Or thoughts/concerns?

Thanks in advance.

Best regards,
Bart

--
Bart van den Eijnden
OSGIS, Open Source GIS
http://www.osgis.nl