[Mapserver-users] XML Mapfile

[Stephen Woodbridge]

OK so SLD the same as Web Map Contexts?
It also sounds like a bunch of this stuff is under active development. 
How much is ready for prime-time on 4.01 and 4.2?
Is there documentation for it, sounds like I have a bunch of reading to do.

The only technical reason for going a different route is the fact that a 
lot of our infrastructure is based on mapscript, perl, php, etc. 
Converting it to work with WMS and SLD "might" be a lot bigger task than 
writing a mapfile -> XML -> mapfile converter.

-Steve W.

Paul Spencer wrote:

> 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
>>>>
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>>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>