server-side SLD support

[Kralidis,Tom [Burlington]]

> 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.
>

This is great news.  I believe the CubeWerx software would also benefit
from this.
 
> 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"

Can this be a URL as well as a filepath?

>   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
>