Mapserver CGI or C API question

[ANDY CANFIELD]

For anyone who may know,
    I am still working on my wireless app for using Mapserver from a Nextel
phone. So far so good except I'm starting to run into some things I don't
think the CGI was designed to do. At least not per the docs. Specifically I
need search functionality. I want to be able to pass in a layer, an
attribute and a value to search for and get back the bounding rectangle of
all the features returned. I'm pretty sure the CGI won't do that. Correct me
if I'm wrong so I don't waste time please. So what I'd like to do is write
my own CGI that does return this info. So these are my questions:

When you search a layer using mapserver's C api and it is searching a
shapefile and you want to search the whole shapefile regardless of bounds is
there any special searching that goes on or is it a straight loop through
all the records in the shape file looking for matches in the attribute field
specified? IE does it load a b-tree in memory and then search the tree or
anything like that?

Thanks,
Andy

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