[Mapserver-users] XML Mapfile

Paul Spencer spencer at dmsolutions.ca
Fri May 28 12:59:44 EDT 2004


this would be WMS and SLD.  The limitation would be that MapServer SLD 
support does not fully describe all the styling options available to a 
normal MapServer layer.

I think I see where you are going with this, I just don't think it is a 
good idea to invent yet another way of doing this if you already have a 
mechanism in place that could do it with only minor modifications.

The concept is good, but it doesn't need to be something new since this 
problem has already been solved.  Unless there is some technical reason 
why WMS/SLD wouldn't serve this purpose?

Paul

Stephen Woodbridge wrote:

> Paul Spencer wrote:
> 
>> Um.  This sounds a lot like Web Map Contexts ;)  Except that only 
>> works with WMS data ... but how were you thinking that the client 
>> would request the map remotely?
> 
> 
> OK, this is not total thought through yet and there may be better ways 
> of doing this. But the idea would be that you could make an xml service 
> available that a user could request a mapfile and get it in xml, they 
> could then modify colors, layers, min/max scales, and labeling 
> (basically the symbology) but not the structure other than turning 
> layers on/off.
> 
> A variant of this idea would be to create and abstraction of the 
> symbology and return that as an xml document and when it is returned 
> then regenerate a new mapfile based on the abstraction. When I create 
> mapfiles I generate an excel spread sheet with with symbolic layers like 
> "ROADS" and then describe the styling and data at the various zoom 
> scales and do that for each virtual layer, then that gets expanded into 
> a Mapserver mapfile and physical layers.
> 
> I kind of like the later option because it is more abstract and hides 
> all the syntactic details of a mapserver mapfile which nobody really 
> needs to know about.
> 
> -Steve
> 
>>
>> Stephen Woodbridge wrote:
>>
>>> Sean Gillies wrote:
>>>
>>>> On May 28, 2004, at 5:16 AM, Stephen Woodbridge wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Hi all,
>>>>>
>>>>> There is a pretty extensive discussion on XML mapfiles in the 
>>>>> archives, did anything come of this? Did anyone build any 
>>>>> conversion tools?
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks,
>>>>>   -Steve W.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> My XML project is not yet bearing any fruit.  Are you going to the 
>>>> users meeting?
>>>> Maybe we could see if any like-minded folks want to discuss it there.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> MUM2 is still a question at this point for me.
>>>
>>> I am interested in doing something with Perl.
>>>
>>> One idea is to:
>>> write a perl script to convert maplexer.l into a Parse::Lex script
>>> and mapparser.y to a Parse::Yapp script. This would allow us to
>>> generate perl code that could accurately read mapfiles based on the
>>> mapserver grammar files. - this may be more trouble than it is worth
>>> as I don't know much about these tools.
>>>
>>> My goal would be to be able to read a mapfile and send it as xml to 
>>> another client. They could make changes to it and request a map based 
>>> on the modified mapfile. The modified mapfile would be validated and 
>>> converted back to a Mapfile or would be dynamically instanciated in 
>>> Mapscript. I don't think Mapscript supports all the functionality we 
>>> need to do the later.
>>>
>>> -Steve
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Mapserver-users mailing list
>>> Mapserver-users at lists.gis.umn.edu
>>> http://lists.gis.umn.edu/mailman/listinfo/mapserver-users
>>>
>>
> 
> 

-- 
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|Paul Spencer                           pspencer at dmsolutions.ca   |
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|Applications & Software Development                              |
|DM Solutions Group Inc                 http://www.dmsolutions.ca/|
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