Time support with filenames only ?
Marco Marsella
m.marsella at ITWORKS.IT
Wed Dec 29 07:30:49 PST 2004
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
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