[Mapserver-users] Map file organization.

[Bob Basques]

Ed McNierney wrote:

>Bob -
>
>I think you might want to give it a try.  Your question said you wanted
>"something like an include (c)", and my suggestion as as close to that
>as you can get <g>!
>
>I agree that a run-time #incldue and #define mechanism would be very
>convenient.  However, any such mechanism would need to be processed for
>EVERY map request; even if a map object is loaded and reused, it still
>gets processed for every load.  Since most of the time map files change
>infrequently (relative to the number of maps rendered) a preprocessing
>option is preferable. 
>
Maybe that's what I'm really after in the end, some way of telling 
Mapserver which pieces of MAP file to process, maybe it's something 
between MapServer and the Map file.  Maybe a set MODE of operation or 
some such.

The idea would be to only process those MapFile Elements associated with 
a particular layer being called.  I'm really not speaking from a large 
base of experience about this.  I would suppose that I'll figure out 
that there is such a mechanism to do this or something close already.

Thanks for keeping me on the straight and narrow on the topic.  :c)

bobb

> But then you also know that I'm a big fan of
>preprocessing everything you can!
>
>	- Ed 
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