Customizing Mapserver and MapLab

[Diego Tiozzo]

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Dear Sirs,


I want to congratulate for good work DM Solutions Group made with MS4W - 
MapServer for Windows, version 1.0.3; I came from early version of MapLab 
and I confess, some year ago, to have renounced to use this product because 
too complex to configure and to make working: on one hand MapLab (early 
version) had some little critical bug, on the other my Apache, PHP and 
MapServer configuring ability was, perhaps, a little poor.

Anyway, now I really appreciate efforts made for a preconfigured product
with all needed components working inside...

As already said, I use MS4W for Windows, version 1.0.3, and it works with
no problems if one doesn't need a too much custom tool; problems start when
you decide to make this product a little more sharpen.

For example,


a) I need to work with a custom legend different from which generated by
     traditional behaviour.

For every map layer, or only for specific ones, I need to use "static" small
gif images rather than ones automatically generated by MapServer so to
produce a final Map page with a specific graphic layers legend rather than
one based on "generic" Esri/ArcView symbols set.

Furthermore I need to show or to hide different layers by group with a legend
that gives me capacity to select or deselect both entire group or, inside it,
every single layer.

In "MapServer HTML Legend HOWTO" document I was not able to find a valid help:
this document describes many things but it doesn't pratically say which files
to modify but assumes only a certain ability to set MapServer templates.

This opens next question, that is


b) how does really templates work?

Problem is every time I try to modify layout of final map including custom
components (like buttons, links), or to change manually original layout or to
translate contents in another languate than english, GMapFactory restores
original template.

Searching in published documentation I have found exhaustive references on
how to set a template mapfile (.map), but not where MapLab stores GMapFactory
settings; I think this is a crucial question because from GMapFactory depends
layout definition of final map application and it makes possible to specify
which mapping interface components to include or exclude...

Certainly a great work has been done both in terms of programming both in
making of detailed documentation but what I think is still weak is absence of
a comprehensive description of entire working process of Mapserver and 
relative MapLab applications.


Regards,


DIEGO TIOZZO NETTI
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