[mapserver-dev] Implement msPostgisLayerGetExtent

[Bart van den Eijnden]

WMS GetCapabilities output is a common use case.

For Oracle I ran into this commonly and almost always configured the layer with an extent in its metadata section to prevent the heavy DB query.

Personally I think disabling by default makes sense, especially since this introduces a behavioural change for PostGIS. I think it would make sense to disable by default then for all drivers where we know this operation is expensive.

Best regards,
Bart

Sent from my iPhone

> On 31 dec. 2013, at 17:20, Stephen Woodbridge <woodbri at swoodbridge.com> wrote:
> 
> Can someone provide a little background on why and where layer extents are used?
> 
> I have never used them and in fact never noticed that there was an extents at the layer level. I have always set the extents at the map level, so I guess by default the layers inherit that.
> 
> I presume that the layer extents are checked to see if the whole layer can be rejected if the image extents does not overlap with the layer extents. Is this correct?
> 
> Assuming that it is correct, are we changing this behavior?
> ie: the layer inheriting from the map extents? (assuming that it did). I would not want to take a performance penalty or not having this and would not want to have to change all my mapfiles to add the extents to all the layers.
> 
> -0 based on not understanding why this is needed and where it gets used!
> 
> -Steve W
> 
> 
> 
>> On 12/31/2013 10:58 AM, Tamas Szekeres wrote:
>> Hi Devs,
>> 
>> I've recently added an implementation for msPostgisLayerGetExtent in the
>> master branch based upon user request, but we entered into a debate with
>> Thomas that this feature should never have been implemented at all.
>> 
>> The key point against this feature is that it may cause performance
>> issues for the existing configurations (as said 'denial of service')
>> when the extent is not specified manually (in the mapfiles) and
>> MapServer will now turn to the driver specific implementation instead of
>> returning MS_FAILURE (in LayerDefaultGetExtent). Thomas also mentioned
>> that this kind of addition should be disabled by default unless voted
>> forward by the PSC.
>> 
>> I did not think that we ever had an agreement not to implement
>> msPostgisLayerGetExtent at all to address potential performance issues
>> by the driver, as this has already been implemented for most of the
>> drivers without such issues manifested. It is already documented that
>> the extent should be configured manually  "to avoid the speed cost of
>> having MapServer compute the extents of the data"
>> (http://mapserver.org/mapfile/layer.html).
>> 
>> Anyway, I would not be against a configuration option to specify that
>> the extent is 'not set' for a layer, but it should be out of scope of a
>> driver implementation. And I'm not really convinced about the usefulness
>> of such setting.
>> 
>> The complete discussion about this change can be found here:
>> https://github.com/mapserver/mapserver/pull/4825
>> 
>> Let me know if you prefer to keep this functionality or revert to the
>> original (not implemented) behaviour.
>> 
>> Best regards,
>> 
>> Tamas
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
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> 
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