FWD: newbie question

[Daniel Morissette]

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> 
> From: "Sebastiaan Raaphorst" <sebastiaan at info.nl>
> 
> I got the mapserver running on NT, see http://routenet.info.nl/nederland/
> which shows the major road network of the Netherlands. In a MS SQL server i
> have vehicle positions which are updated every minute, i would like to put
> them on the map. The vehicle positions are stored in a simple table
> containing vehicle_id, lat, lon, speed, status and timestmap. Any
> suggestions on how to ad this 'layer' to the map ?
> 

I don't think you can do that directly with the mapserv CGI without some
kind of scripting on the server.

So one way could be to use MapScript in a PHP environment (or maybe
Perl???, not sure since you're on Windows???) to access your table
through ODBC and create a temporary shapefile with your locations.  Then
you add the temporary shapefile to your .map file and draw the map.  

If you have only a few locations to map then you may not even need to
create a temporary shapefile... just creating pointObj features in
MapScript and drawing them should be good enough.

Unfortunately there is no sample application showing how to do that, but
that would be a good candidate for a new MapScript demo since this kind
of question comes back often.

Good Luck!
-- 
------------------------------------------------------------
 Daniel Morissette             morissette at dmsolutions.on.ca
               http://www.dmsolutions.on.ca/
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  Don't put for tomorrow what you can do today, because if 
      you enjoy it today you can do it again tomorrow.