WFS Server Layer Aggregation

[Daniel Morissette]

David Fawcett wrote:
>
> To those of you who added WFS support to MapServer.
>
> In a MapServer WFS Server instance, is it possible to build a Map file
> in a way that you aggregate many local data layers into one layer that
> can be requested from a WFS Client?
>
> I realize that you could do this with one or more tileindex's if your
> domain of layers was static, however, I am thinking of situations where
> a dynamic mapfile is used.
>

You mean presenting a group of individual layers as a single feature
type in the WFS capabilities?

There is no way to do that at the moment, and that would be a
complicated one to deal with. WFS assumes that all features in a given
layer (layer=FeatureType) share the same schema and MapServer needs to
be able to produce that schema on the fly in response to
(DescribeFeatureType). The GML output of a GetFeature also needs to
follow that common schema for all features in the response. If you allow
grouping of layers, then it's hard to enforce the requirement for a
common schema between layers. I think the best way to go is still the
tileindex.

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