[Mapserver-users] Odd Error

[Dylan Keon]

Jeff Berry wrote:
> I have a lakes polygon layer that draws just fine at large scales.  However,
> if I zoom out to the entire extent of the dataset I get the following error:
> 
> Warning: MapServer Error in msDrawShape(): Only polygon shapes can be drawn
> using a POLYGON layer definition.
> 
> This happens with a couple other polygon layers as well, when I zoom out to
> a point where a lot of polygon features are displayed in the current extent.
> 
> What is causing this?

Could those layers contain unclosed polygons?  This is just a wild guess 
since I don't know how MapServer handles that type of situation, but 
perhaps the large scale views were successful because you happened to be 
displaying small regions where all polygons were closed.  Then, when 
zoomed to full extent, MapServer throws the error when trying to render 
the unclosed polygons (?)

If you have ArcInfo at your disposal you could try converting your 
shapefiles to coverages, running CLEAN to build polygon topology, and 
converting back to shapefiles.

--Dylan

-- 
************************************************
  Dylan Keon
  GIS/Database Research Specialist
  Northwest Alliance for Computational
  Science and Engineering (NACSE)
  Oregon State University
  Corvallis, OR 97331
  keon at nacse.org        (541) 737-6608
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