[mapserver-users] Developing Skins for Mapserver Apps

[Stephen Woodbridge]

Antti,

Good point about caching the menu stuff. My sample code does something
similar. I also modified it to display the legendicons. Check out this
link and select "Demo It" and then "demo.map":
  http://swoodbridge.com/map/mapserver/snippets/

-Steve

Antti.Roppola at brs.gov.au wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I have been working on something like that. We have a couple of
> Mapserver apps up, and already, trying to keep the content and
> the supporting HTML is sync is a pain.
> 
> Currently, I have a PHP app that recurses through a .map file and
> builds an interface based entirely on what it finds there. Here is
> an example:
> 
>         for($n=0; $n < $map->{numlayers}; $n++) {                       // Create gadgets while layers exist in $map
>                 $layer = $map->getlayer($n);
>                 $layer_name = $layer->{name};
>                 if($layer_select[$n]==1) {
>                         $checked="checked";
>                         $layer = $map->getlayer($n);
>                         $layer->set("status", 1);
>                 } else {
>                         $checked="";
>                 }
>                 echo("<input type=checkbox name=layer_select[$n] value=1 $checked>$layer_name<br>\n");
>         }
> 
> This is a *bit* silly (to build the form on every transaction even if
> the map file hasn't changed), but it would be easy to build in hooks
> to cache all this work so it's only done when the map file changes.
> 
> Hopefully I'll put the whole thing up for FTP once it's completed, I am
> currently doing Zoom & Pan, & was able to re-use Daniel's GMap code to
> do the query function. Reusable code is good...  :o)
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Antti
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Stephen Woodbridge [mailto:woodbri at swoodbridge.com]
> 
> if we could make navigation interfaces like "skins." It would be really
> cool of you could drop a "skin" into a directory with a map file and it
> would just work! You might need to run a utility to init the "skin", but
> 
> To accomplish this, you would need to be able to discover what is in a
> map file (doable today) and maybe via the metadata get info on what
> should be exposed via the skin. And if you wanted to use an external