[MapServer-dev] Remove requirement for TEMPLATE keyword?

[Rahkonen Jukka]

Hi,

I think that having a keyword QUERYABLE=yes/no with default value "no" would be easy to understand. TEMPLATE would be preserved for the text/html output.

-Jukka Rahkonen-


TEMPLATE would
-----Alkuperäinen viesti-----
Lähettäjä: MapServer-dev <mapserver-dev-bounces at lists.osgeo.org> Puolesta Seth G via MapServer-dev
Lähetetty: sunnuntai 26. tammikuuta 2025 10.47
Vastaanottaja: MapServer Devs <mapserver-dev at lists.osgeo.org>
Aihe: [MapServer-dev] Remove requirement for TEMPLATE keyword?

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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