[Mapserver-users] Large Map Files

[Ed McNierney]

Paul -

As I've mentioned on the list before, we manage all our MAP files by processing them through the C preprocessor.  So we just put #include statements in them, run them through the C compiler's first pass, and get our MAP files.  This works fine for us, and has the added benefit of supporting #define macros, etc.

	- 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: Paul Ramsey [mailto:pramsey at refractions.net]
Sent: Tuesday, February 11, 2003 2:03 PM
To: Jan Hartmann
Cc: mapserver-users at lists.gis.umn.edu
Subject: Re: [Mapserver-users] Large Map Files


I have been thinking that an extremely powerful extension to the .map 
file would be an "INCLUDE" directive, which reads a map file fragment 
into another map file.  A quick-and-dirty map service could then be 
assembled with:

MAP
   INCLUDE standard-headers.map
   INCLUDE standard-basemap-layers.map
   LAYER
     NAME myspeciallayer
     DATA blah
     TYPE polygon
   END
END

The FME does this in its mapping files, for example. The first stage of 
processing is to replace all INCLUDE lines with their referenced 
content. It recursively does this up to a max number of loops.

For people maintaining alot of different map services, it could be a 
real boon. (Your parcel postgis database is now on a new server? Change 
the *one* parcel layer definition, and all the maps which reference it 
are now up-to-date.)

P.

Jan Hartmann wrote:
> Just my personal view, but isn't this problem of too many classes (or 
> layers) perhaps caused by using a MapFile in two different ways: as a 
> generator of a single layered map, and as a repository of all available 
> map layers? I can hardly imagine a single map with more than fifty 
> classes or one hundred layers. What people seem to do is putting every 
> GIS file they have in a single MapFile and turning layers on and off as 
> needed. As every layer needs its own classes, the maximum number of 50 
> is very soon reached, even if only a small part of these will be ever 
> used in any actual map.

-- 
       __
      /
      | Paul Ramsey
      | Refractions Research
      | Email: pramsey at refractions.net
      | Phone: (250) 885-0632
      \_

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