Summary - NT Demo Problems with cached querymap

[Fawcett, David]

In trying to get MapServer up and running on a Win32 machine at home, I installed Apache, ported some basic MapServer applications from UNIX, and installed the latest version of the Demo.  I am running MapServer 3.3.011 on NT/Apache.

First issue:  When I downloaded the demo, ms_demo.tar.gz from http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/dload.html, my NT machine trimmed the .gz off of the end of the filename.  When I tried to extract it with WinZip, I got an error.  If this happens to you, just add .gz back to the filename and it should unzip with no problems.

Second issue:  I set up the demo and an Itemquery example (case 3) from the Test Suite.  Both applications ran on my machine, except that in the Demo, the cached querymap image crashed and in the test suite, the zoomed querymap crashed.

Thanks to Perry Nacionales, I figured out what the problem is.  MapServer apparently doesn't like any spaces in path names.

When I installed Apache, I just went with the default path (c:\program files\apache group\apache\) because I knew that I wouldn't be using it as a real Web server.  The best solution is to install your Web server much closer to the root (e.g. c:\apache\).  

If you need to keep spaces in your path, there are some work arounds.

In the Demo, the problem shows up in the demo_footer file.  mapserv.exe will take spaces if you replace them with a +.  

Here in line 7, there are two potential problems.  The first one is the [map] variable.  Even if you replace the spaces in the path set for the map variable in your demo_init file with +, (e.g. <input type="hidden" name="map" value="c:\program+files\apache+group\apache\htdocs\new_demo\demo.map">), when you place [map] in a request as below, it crashes.  To get around this, you could hard code the map path.    

src="/cgi-bin/mapserv.exe?map=[map]&queryfile=c:\program+files\apache+group\apache\htdocs\new_demo\DEMO[id].qy[get_layers]&mode=map&size=200+200"></td></tr>

When you set the path for the queryfile, you can replace the spaces with + as done above.  

David.

David Fawcett
MN Office of Environmental Assistance