[MapServer-dev] RFC-140 - MapServer Homepage

[Seth G]

Hi Even,

Thanks for your valuable feedback. 

The homepage would be a "superset" of all available Mapfiles in a MapServer deployment, as listed in the CONFIG file. Each individual Mapfile would still have its own OGC API landing page, so the homepage is best described as a directory of all landing pages. 

As most MapServer deployments will likely be serving out a combination of WxS and new OGC API services for some time to come, it will allow both types to be listed together (I'm unaware of a OGC API spec that would cover this). 

In regard to the JSON used for links, I was modelling it as closely as possible to OGC API conventions. Looking at the pygeoapi demo home page, it provides a set of links in a common format, so I'll likely switch to this format/approach:

https://demo.pygeoapi.io/stable?f=json

A few of the "rel" values are defined as below, and can be reused:

alternate	Provides an alternate representation (e.g., HTML version of a resource).
service-desc	Links to the machine-readable API description (e.g., OpenAPI JSON).
service-doc	Links to the human-readable API documentation (e.g., OpenAPI HTML).
conformance	Lists the standards and conformance classes supported by the API.

I'll update the RFC with the above,

Seth

--
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On Sat, Jan 18, 2025, at 12:39 PM, Even Rouault wrote:
> Seth,
>
> Thanks for putting this together. I'm wondering how much your proposal 
> relates/intersects with the concept of the landing page of OGC API 
> services ? You mention some connection with it, but it is not 
> immediately clear to me  the exact nature of the connection. Perhaps it 
> is just a matter of clarifying. I have put zero thoughts in it, but it 
> would feel weird to invent a MapServer specific thing, so I'm naively 
> wondering if we can't we just adopt the landing page formalism (for the 
> JSON part), and potentially extend it by exposing old WxS services as 
> well in the links as you suggest? I'm also wondering if there's some 
> best practice used by other projects on how to expose for things like
>
> {
>              "href": 
> "https://demo.mapserver.org/cgi-bin/wms?SERVICE=WMS&VERSION=1.3.0&REQUEST=GetCapabilities",
>              "title": "GetCapabilities",
>              "type": "WMS"
>          },
>
> so they can be interoperably consumed.
>
> Even
>
> Le 18/01/2025 à 09:11, Seth G via MapServer-dev a écrit :
>> Hi devs,
>>
>> I've drafted an RFC with an approach of creating a MapServer homepage based on the MAPs referenced in a mapserver.conf file. This will allow MapServer installations to easily advertise available services, dynamically.
>>
>> Text available in pull request at https://github.com/MapServer/MapServer-documentation/pull/996
>>
>> Comments and thoughts appreciated,
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Seth
>>
>> --
>> web:https://geographika.net & https://mapserverstudio.net
>> mastodon: @geographika at mastodon.social
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>
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