[mapserver-users] external links in a map

[Ian Turton]

At 17:24 04/09/02, Puneet Kishor wrote:
>well, it may be a bit more complicated than that...
>
>
> > From: Mark Phillips [mailto:mbp at geomtech.com]
> > > Is there a way to include URL's / links into a map?
> > > For example: the user clicks on an object, symbol or label
> > and the click
> > > triggers the link.
> >
> > It should be possible to do this in a mapscript script (php,
> > perl, ...)
> > by detecting the click in the script, and having the script send
> > an http "Location:" header back to the browser to cause it to go to
> > whatever URL you want the clicked-on object to correspond to.
> >
>
>
>let's say I am mapping houses... and I want the resulting map to have an
>embedded imagemap so that when I click (or, better yet, hover) on a house a
>window pops up with some attributes for that house... in other words, I have
>streamed the attributes along with the map all of it to the client. Since I
>don't know where each house is going to be, I can't really construct an
>imagemap. I mean, it can be done... its just not easy... I would have to
>preprocess all the features in a result set, get their bounding boxes, and
>then generate an imagemap from those boxes before sending all of it to the
>client...

I think you're really looking for a smart client to be able to do that for 
you. I don't want people to think I only ever post to this list to say look 
at GeoTools (www.geotools.org) as I think mapserver is an excellent piece 
of software and we use it every day in our work in the Centre for 
Computational Geography. But I really think some of the people on this list 
are trying to push it way beyond its limits. Maybe this is just because I'm 
a sad old unix hacker and I like one tool to do one job and do it well 
rather than bloating a tool so it becomes jack of all trades and master of 
none.
Simply put if your problem needs a smart client then that's the way to go 
rather than trying to push your server into contortions to do it.

Ian

>someone correct me if I am wrong.
>
>pk/