Multiple geometry types in single layer

Steve Lime steve.lime at DNR.STATE.MN.US
Thu Aug 12 13:35:13 PDT 2004


MapServer relies on the layer TYPE to decide how to render a feature.
The feature type (obtained from that datasource) is used for error
checking.
You can draw a polygon feature using a line layer and a line or polygon
feature using a point layer. You can't draw a point as a polygon though.
So, if the Oracle Spatial  driver in MapServer allows access to multiple
feature you probably can do some simple stuff, but you couldn't set up
EXPRESSIONs to capitalize on the type of a feature. At this point you'd
have to filter based on feature type at the connection level, that is,
just deal with all the points in one layer and so on.

Steve

>>> "Judd, Chris" <Chris.Judd at DEP.STATE.FL.US> 8/12/2004 2:52:02 PM
>>>
MapServer folks,

We are looking to use MapServer to serve Oracle Spatial data that has
multiple geometry types (points, lines and polygons) in a single
layer.

Many databases support multiple geometry types in the same layer.  This
is a
quote from the SDE wiki
(http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?MapServerSDE) "SDE
techically
allows for storage of multiple geometry types in the same layer..."  I
believe PostGIS has also added this feature.

We were able to mine Google and find this post from Paul Ramsey dated
2001,
stating at that time MapServer could only render one geometry type per
layer.
http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/data2/wilma/mapserver-users/0110/msg00187.html


My questions are:

1) Does the current version of MapServer support the rendering of more
than
one geometry type in a single layer?
2) Is there an example of this?  Any example would be helpful.

Thanks for your support.

Chris Judd
Florida DEP



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