Time support with filenames only ?

[Marco Marsella]

Hi,

we are trying out MapServer and it looks great! However, we plan to serve a lot of time-dependent
raster layers (satellite images) both through WMS and WCS. Our images are store in files where the
date is part of the filename (e.g. 2004-12-23.tif or similar). My understanding is that we need
either a DB or a shapefile to index the time values. Is that right ?

If this is true, this would be an inconvenience because each time we get a new image (and some
are received every 30 minutes) we would have to update the DB or the shapefile. What about some
way to use tokens in filenames ?

For instance, we could write something like:

LAYER
    NAME "meteosat"
    TYPE RASTER
    DATA "%YY%-%MM%-%DD%.tif"
    FILTER "%time%"
END

The idea being that the time filter item is automatically parsed in its components whose values are
placed in the %YY%, %MM%, %DD% (and %HH%, %MI%, %SS% if present) tokens that are then plugged
into the filename template provided by DATA to obtain the final filename to get.

This would be a considerable simplification would it not ?

Please advise.

Regards