OGR Autostyling and other providers, styling RFC?

[Daniel Morissette]

Tamas Szekeres wrote:
> 
> But my other problem related to this is that the style info is
> assigned to the features but we cannot utilize layer level styles at
> the data source. Therefore loading the styles happens in that time
> when the features are actually drawn and the last loaded style is
> preserved at layer level. Currently I have approx 3000 OGR layers with
> syle info but I guess all of them use the same style for each feature
> actually. This behaviour causes some known issues (like the problems
> around rendering those layers in the legend) that have been been
> discovered early but haven't been addressed yet.
> 

FYI Tamas, "styles at the layer level" was part of the original "OGR 
Feature Style" design but was never implemented... so if we want to go 
that route we got a bit more work to do, both in OGR and MapServer.

Using a style table at the layer level and linking features to styles by 
style-id is an extremely powerful way to do rendering. Combine style 
tables with the concept of priority levels and you can do even more 
powerful things. We had implemented that approach in a cartographic 
editing software in a previous life before my webmapping days and that's 
why I had included section 2.7 in the OGR Feature Style document 
(http://gdal.org/ogr/ogr_feature_style.html)... but as I wrote above 
this was never implemented in OGR.

Daniel
-- 
Daniel Morissette
http://www.mapgears.com/