[mapserver-users] XML mapfile?

[Tyler Mitchell]

I think you want to get into the WMS server specifications.  The idea
(AFAIK) is to make a URL request like:
http://myserver.com/cgi-bin/mapserv?map=/var/www/html/msapps/mymapfile.map&request=getcapabilties

This will return a nice XML summary of your map file.  Let me know how it
goes Frank.
:)
Tyler


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|         |           05/21/2002 02:27 PM         |
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  |       To:       mapserver-users at lists.gis.umn.edu                                                                            |
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  |       Subject:  [mapserver-users] XML mapfile?                                                                               |
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Maybe I just don't know MapServer well enough, but I'm having trouble
getting all the information I need to get out of the mapfile with the
restrictions imposed by template file architecture.  In other words, I want

to get at specific elements in the mapfile from the client which is
typically done by placing tokens in template files.
It seems that this and many other problems I encounter could be solved by
making the .map file format XML based.  I searched the archives and have
seen quite a bit of discussion on it but I didn't a conclusion.  The
benefit
for me being that I could download and easily parse and retrieve any
information I needed using XPath.  Is this being considered at all?  If so,

I'd be happy to contribute to the discussion and development (wherever I
could, but I don't know the C language yet) if that would help.  A
combination of an XML mapfile, XSLT templates and XPath extremely powerful
compared the current template files.  If I'm not making any sense or anyone

would like more specifics on what that architecture would be like, I'd be
happy to elaborate... once I nail it down :)

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