[MapServer-dev] Remove requirement for TEMPLATE keyword?

[Seth G]

Hi devs,

One of the issues I've run into when explaining MapServer to colleagues is the TEMPLATE keyword. The docs don't really explain its purpose, or mention how it makes a layer "queryable" [1]. I also ran into myself this week when a layer wasn't displaying in the OGC Features API as I forgot to add TEMPLATE to the LAYER definition. 

Should dropping the requirement to add a TEMPLATE to a LAYER to make it queryable be considered in a future release?

There are more and more examples of the following, which is hard to explain to new users:

LAYER
    TEMPLATE "ttt"
    # or
    # TEMPLATE VOID
    ...

There are also many cases in the codebase where this is set automatically anyway: 

    layer->template = msStrdup("ttt");

The only problem I can see is that it could accidentally allow feature attributes to "leak" out, e.g. for LAYERs with a "select * from tbl", but there is a prevalence of examples when TEMPLATE is set to a fake value anyway.
Are there any other side-effects if it were set to be "on" by default?

Seth


[1] https://mapserver.org/mapfile/layer.html#mapfile-layer-template

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