[Mapserver-users] Accessing the spatial part of a shp file

[Steve McCrone]

Hi gain,

Would like to get some ideas on how to access the coordinates of a spatial
shape.
My goal is to have the user 'locate' (i.e. pan & zoom) to a spatial data.

In other words, the user would select from a list of roads, for example, and
then push a 'find' button. The
map would zom and pan to the road. Once I extract the coordinates that make
up the road
I could adjust the map extants to zoom & pan.

I was hoping that i could perform a record search on the shape file, find
the record that contains the attribute (name for example),
extract the coordinates of the polyline, point or polygon and then adjust
the map.

Or do I have to create a separate table that contains a pre-defined centre
coordinate of the spatial data and then use this
to adjust the map extents.

Thanks
Steve