WMS Client problem

[Daniel Morissette]

Jerl Simpson wrote:
>
> The problem comes in with the wms_name, it has a ":" in it that seems
> to get translated to "%3A".  My layer name is "Soundings:Fusion" for
> instance and the WMS server looks for the ":" and won't convert "%3A"
> back to the colon.  So the layer name that ends up back at the server
> is "Soundings" rather than "Soundings:Fusion"
>

You made me doubt for a sec, but I did a quick research and it seems
that the problem is at the server end: any CGI script or program should
know how to decode *any* %xx value in a URL. MapServer is required to
encode any unsafe character (see RFC-1738) in the GetMap URL. The ':' is
a reserved character, and RFC-1738 says:

   "Thus, only alphanumerics, the special characters "$-_.+!*'(),", and
    reserved characters used for their reserved purposes may be used
    unencoded within a URL."

This means that the ':' is required to be encoded in the context of the
LAYERS parameter in a GetMap URL. Even if it wasn't required to encode
the character, it would still be legal to encode it:

   "On the other hand, characters that are not required to be encoded
    (including alphanumerics) may be encoded within the scheme-specific
    part of a URL, as long as they are not being used for a reserved
    purpose."


There is not much you can do about this other than trying to have the
server fixed.

Daniel
--
------------------------------------------------------------
  Daniel Morissette               dmorissette at dmsolutions.ca
  DM Solutions Group              http://www.dmsolutions.ca/
------------------------------------------------------------