here's a trick to make MapServer URLs shorter

[Gregor Mosheh]

I came up with a solution that I thought would be of
interest to everybody, so here it is. It seems to work
well in all the cases we've tested, but of course any
feedback is welcome.


Problem: MapServer URLs are horribly long, what with
all the program= and map= and mode= stuff in the query
string.

Solution: Set up an Apache handler and a wrapper
script, so that an URL pointing to a .map file causes
MapServer to run instead.


This is a CGI program. Put it into your cgi-bin
directory and chmod it. And you'll need to fix a few
of the paths to match your own installation.

#!/bin/sh

# if there's no query string, make a basic one
# assuming they want browse mode
if [ "$QUERY_STRING" = "" ]; then

QUERY_STRING="mode=browse&program=/cgi-bin/mapserv.cgi"
fi
export QUERY_STRING
# the URL they gave is the URL to the mapfile
# appending the mapfile to the query string
# helps with browse mode
MS_MAPFILE=$PATH_TRANSLATED
export MS_MAPFILE
QUERY_STRING=$QUERY_STRING"&map=$PATH_TRANSLATED"
# now just run MapServer now
exec /usr/local/apache/cgi-bin/mapserv.cgi



Then, in Apache's httpd.conf file, set up a handler.
Anything with a .map extension gets sent to that
wrapper.

# make MapServer mapfiles "executable"
Action mapfilewrapper /cgi-bin/mapfilewrappper.cgi
AddHandler mapfilewrapper .map



So now instead of this:
http://server/cgi-bin/mapserv?map=/home/bob/public_html/maps/foo.map&mode=browse&program=/cgi-bin/mapserv

You should be able to do this:
http://server/~bob/foo.map





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