some issues about the mapserver map files & HTTP POST

[Chris]

Hi Nuno,

I will try to answer some of your questions:

PROJECTIONS:
You have to declare the Coordinate System (CS) of the data you are using,
however you do not need to explicitly set your output CS.  You can specify
whatever output you want by setting the "SRS" parameter in your WMS query.
As long as PROJ.4 supports your output CRS, then you should be fine.

HTTP POST:
Mapserver does support this.  I think you have to send it as an XML request.
I have done this and it works fine.  The DTD is in the WMS spec.  It would
be nice if there was a SOAP interface to WMS.

Regards,
Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: Nuno GIL [mailto:nunoragil at YAHOO.COM]
Sent: Sunday, November 21, 2004 10:36 PM
To: MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU
Subject: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] some issues about the mapserver map files
& HTTP POST


Dear listers,

Sorry for this long post, but I was trying to gather
some thoughts/doubts...
After reading again the mapserver documentation, I
still have some doubts concerning the setup of a wms
server.

OUTPUTFORMAT
I'm only providing two OUTPUTFORMATs in my map file,
however, the capabilities file specifies much more
outputs (I think all the formats supported by my
mapserver). If it understands the supported
OUTPUTFORMATs why do we need to include them in the
map file? Is there any way of limiting the
OUTPUTFORMATs to the ones I want instead of the ones
supported by mapserver?

PROJECTION
I am still a bit confused with the PROJECTION object.
I suppose that by declaring a PROJECTION object on the
map file I am defining the supported output
projections of the server and by declaring the
projection inside each layer I am defining the
original current projection of the data. Is that
correct?
I also suppose that any user could ask for any
projection supported by mapserver in order to receive
an on the fly projected map (even without any
PROJECTION object included on the map file). So, is
the PROJECTION object simply a definition of the
mapserver supported output projections? By not
declaring any PROJECTION object are we restraining the
available ouput projections?

TRANSPARENCY
At the moment, the transparency of each layer of my
wms is on and defined with OFFSITE. I would like to
turn TRANSPARENCY on or off accordingly to the html
wms user request. How can I do this?


And a last question...
Does Mapserver support HTTP/POST methods?
How could I easily convert a HTTP/GET method like
this:
http://iceds.ge.ucl.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wms?map=wms_srtm.map&VERSION=1.1.1&REQUEST
=GetMap&SRS=EPSG:4326&BBOX=-32,-35,101,60&WIDTH=600&HEIGHT=539&LAYERS=SRTM&F
ORMAT=image/jpeg&BGCOLOR=0xffffff&TRANSPARENT=TRUE&EXCEPTIONS=application/vn
d.ogc.se_inimage
to a HTTP/POST one?

Thank you very much for any help or comments.
Regards,
Nuno



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