[mapserver-users] external links in a map

[Ed McNierney]

Ian -

While I don't disagree with your general approach, I think this is a very reasonable feature for MapServer, and I've been looking at it a bit myself.  If it's reasonable to let MapServer generate point symbols or polygons on a map image, and it's reasonable for MapServer to have a "query" mode in which you click on those things to produce querymaps of that feature, then I think it's equally reasonable for that server to generate flyover labels, etc. for the same feature.  It happens that HTML requires a completely different set of tags (imagemap) to do such a thing, but that's not MapServer's fault nor is it a good reason to not want MapServer to generate them.

What I do not particularly want is two SEPARATE tools traversing the same data set to generate two related outputs unless there's a deterministic way to ensure they are consistent.  If GeoTools and MapServer don't render a polygon feature exactly the same way, my imagemap won't agree with my image.  That may or may not be important to my application.

GeoTools is CERTAINLY worth investigating for this particular problem, but do think that it's a reasonable thing to want MapServer to do.  Another good tool philosophy is that if you've got one tool that already knows how to do 90% of the job, it might be helpful to add the other 10%.  I think they're both useful ways of looking at a problem.

	- Ed

Ed McNierney
President and Chief Mapmaker
TopoZone.com / Maps a la carte, Inc.
73 Princeton Street, Suite 305
North Chelmsford, MA  01863
ed at topozone.com
(978) 251-4242 

-----Original Message-----
From: Ian Turton [mailto:ian at geography.leeds.ac.uk]
Sent: Wednesday, September 04, 2002 2:22 PM
To: Puneet Kishor
Cc: mapserver-users at lists.gis.umn.edu
Subject: RE: [mapserver-users] external links in a map


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/