Assign special dbf to shapefile

[Holger Floerke]

Hi all,

am I able to assign a special dbf-file to a shape file? For example
rendering the 'airports.shp', but using data from 'airports_passengers.dbf'
and not from 'airports.dbf' (ensuring the correct order for the
shape-information-mapping). Or another example, render some area shapes on
the one hand with popuplation data and on the other hand with unemployment
data without integrating both data sets into the dbf of the shape file and
without producing two different shape-files. I use php-mapscript and
mapserver 4.4.

HolgeR