[mapserver-dev] incorrect layer drawing order issue

[Jeff McKenna]

The Basemaps sub-project also heavily relies on "ORDER BY" for the 
rendering order of features (in my case within Postgres, and using large 
OpenStreetMap datasets), so I am curiously following this discussion too :)

-jeff



On 2014-11-10 12:44 PM, Lime, Steve D (MNIT) wrote:
> I would love to see some sort of sorting capability but at least for
> shapefiles I've always relied on a presort (using sortshp utility) for
> performance reasons. I think if something more configurable was needed
> then one would simply need to OGR access as a wrapper for shapefiles.
> Maybe the various driver owners could weigh in regarding the SORTBY option.
>
> Steve
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From:* mapserver-dev-bounces at lists.osgeo.org
> [mapserver-dev-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] on behalf of Tamas Szekeres
> [szekerest at gmail.com]
> *Sent:* Sunday, November 09, 2014 3:21 PM
> *To:* geographika at gmail.com
> *Cc:* mapserver-dev at lists.osgeo.org
> *Subject:* Re: [mapserver-dev] incorrect layer drawing order issue
>
> Yes that would be the simplest approach in short term.
> But I think it would also be reasonable to get it configurable for all
> supported drivers, through mapfile and mapscript.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Tamas
>
>
>
> 2014-11-09 20:49 GMT+01:00 geographika <geographika at gmail.com
> <mailto:geographika at gmail.com>>:
>
>     Would a SORTBY clause be added as a keyword in the DATA statement?
>     E.g. DATA "ogr_geometry from rivers USING UNIQUE ogr_fid USING
>     SRID=4326 USING SORTBY my_sort_fieldname"
>
>
>     On 07/11/2014 12:49, Tamas Szekeres wrote:
>>     We could also extend the DATA section with a SORTBY clause for the
>>     mssql driver.
>>     Adding this feature to MSSQL (as per RFC 105) would anyway be
>>     fairly easy.
>>
>>     Tamas
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>     2014-11-07 11:24 GMT+01:00 geographika <geographika at gmail.com
>>     <mailto:geographika at gmail.com>>:
>>
>>         Hi list,
>>
>>         I have come across an issue that is critical to the project I
>>         am working on and wondered if it applies to all database
>>         drivers or just the SQL Server 2008 one.
>>
>>         I have logged the issue on GitHub at:
>>         https://github.com/mapserver/mapserver/issues/5008
>>
>>         I will try some tests over the weekend to see if the Postgres
>>         driver works the same way, but there seems to be no way of
>>         guaranteeing feature display order - even if all documentation
>>         suggests it can be achieved in a database layer using "ORDER BY"
>>         Whilst for a low number of records the order seems ordered,
>>         with 150+ features I get different images returned each time
>>         by my WMS service. No use of clustered indexes, partition
>>         statements etc. can get around this as SQL result sets can
>>         only be guaranteed with an ORDER BY in the outermost statement.
>>
>>         I note that in
>>         http://mapserver.org/fr/development/rfc/ms-rfc-105.html there
>>         is a new function msLayerBuildSQLOrderBy() that allows sorting
>>         to be done outside of the layer's DATA statement for WFS
>>         requests with a SORTBY parameter. Maybe this could also be
>>         used by a new LAYER "SORT" config keyword?
>>
>>         I see the above is only implemented for a few drivers. The
>>         client would be willing to fund adding this to the SQL Server
>>         driver if there are any core devs interested in doing this.
>>
>>         Regards,
>>
>>         Seth
>>
>>         --
>>         web:http://geographika.co.uk
>>         twitter: @geographika
>>
>>
>>
>