Call for comments - RFC 36

[Doyon, Jean-Francois]

Am I understanding correctly that associating a template with a layer
would no longer happen, but instead the template would be associated
with a given outputformat?  Does this force the idea of a single
template per map per format?

We have thousands of query templates (a common head and footer, and one
per queryable layer, with many layers per map, and hundreds of maps, and
2 languages), so I'm defintiely interested in this topic :P

This would be nice because it'd help consolidate query templates into
fewer files, and more logically per map, as well as allowing multiple
output formats.

Have there been any thoughts of adding a cgi parameter to control query
output format? Or would I use the map_web_queryformat notation? Just a
thought.

Also, is QUERYFORMAT completely new? It's in webObj, but not mentionned
in the mapfile reference.

For me the importance would be to try and minimize the impact on the
exiting templates and language.  If I can just take existing templates
and merge them into one with a few extra tokens like [resultset] wrapped
around, then that's not too bad, not fun, but it's all in the name of
progress :)

Also, I don't think I'm seeing anything here that precludes keeping both
ways (using QUERYFORMAT/OUTPUTFORMAT/DRIVER/TEMPLATE and current
HEADER/LAYER/FOOTER).  Might be good to have a bit of overlap where both
mechanisms exist for a while and then the old way is phased out later?

J.F.

-----Original Message-----
From: UMN MapServer Developers List [mailto:MAPSERVER-DEV at LISTS.UMN.EDU]
On Behalf Of Steve Lime
Sent: November 1, 2007 15:09
To: MAPSERVER-DEV at LISTS.UMN.EDU
Subject: [UMN_MAPSERVER-DEV] Call for comments - RFC 36

Hi all: I (with the help of Tom K.) put together an RFC outlining better
template support for queries via the CGI interface.  Please take a look
at:

  http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/development/rfc/ms-rfc-36/ 

Steve