[mapserver-dev] Proposal to add built-in OpenLayers map viewer

[Stephen Woodbridge]

Daniel,

This sounds great! I like the idea of keeping it a very simple 
interactive viewer. Based on the other comments that this has generated 
about potentially support for more complicated viewers that those get 
put into another RFC for some kind of templated viewer approach where 
any viewer could add a template to support thair flavor of viewer.

I generate one of these trivial OL apps every time I make a mapfile just 
for the purpose of viewing it and 99% of the time it only has that one 
layer in it. I think this would be a wonderful time saver.

-Steve W

On 9/24/2010 2:17 PM, Daniel Morissette wrote:
> This was discussed at the code sprint in Barcelona, and I just created a
> ticket for it. We'd like to add this to 6.0... but I am realizing just
> now that maybe I should start with a RFC...
>
> Anyway, here is what I wrote in the ticket, please feel free to comment,
> keeping in mind this has to remain __simple__:
>
> http://trac.osgeo.org/mapserver/ticket/3549
>
> Every once in a while we get requests for a simple way to test a
> mapfile. One way to handle this could be to do as GeoServer does and
> provide a built-in OpenLayers based map viewer. In the GeoServer case,
> this viewer is returned when one issues a WMS GetMap request with
> format=application/openlayers in it.
>
> I propose that we provide a similar functionality in MapServer, which
> would be triggered in one of two ways:
>
> 1- Using mapserv?map=/path/to/my.map&'''mode=openlayers''' ... in this
> case the viewer would be initialized based on the mapfile defaults, and
> some of the traditional mapserv CGI params may also work (such as map
> size, layer selection, etc.)
>
> 2- Using '''format=application/openlayers''' in a WMS GetMap request as
> GeoServer does. Note that in this case the rest of the GetMap parameters
> would be used to configure the map to view (BBOX, WIDTH, HEIGHT, LAYERS,
> etc.)
>
> Both cases would call the same function internally to produce a simple
> OpenLayeres viewer with one singletile layer for the whole map with the
> selected layers.
>
>