Serving A Large Archive an openpap-client/wms-server

[John Bonk]

Frank,

 Thanks. We have considered dynamic generation of map files.

I haven't yet been able to read up on mapscript, but I'm wondering how 
a user would do a GetCapabilities request it this case.

 John


 -----Original Message-----
 From: Frank Warmerdam <fwarmerdam at gmail.com>
 To: jpbonk at aol.com
 Cc: MAPSERVER-USERS at lists.umn.edu
 Sent: Fri, 8 Jul 2005 14:33:07 -0400
  Subject: Re: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] Serving A Large Archive an 
openpap-client/wms-server

 On 7/8/05, John Bonk <jpbonk at aol.com> wrote:
 > We have a lot of data on an opendap server. We had plans for a
  > MapServer opendap-client/wms-server--in other words we wanted to 
build
 > a MapServer that will serve raster data from our opendap server.
 >
 > We were working on a prototype that will serve one of our products.
  > The product consists of monthly files, each file contains 2 
parameters
 > per file. At present there are over 80 months (files) of data.
 >
 > I still consider myself a novice and may have some misconceptions
  > about MapServer, but my understanding is that to offer this data I 
will
  > need a mapfile with over 160 layers--one for each file times 2 for 
the
 > 2 parameters.
 >
 > I read in one of the documents
  > (http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/doc44/mapfile-reference.html) that 
there
 > is a 50 layer limit for a mapfile. The document said that this limit
 > could be raised by making a change to map.h. However, some of our
 > products have files containing over a hundred parameters. I estimate
 > that if we wanted to offer each of the parameters in each file for
 > several of our products, we would need a mapfile with hundreds of
 > thousands layers. Are we expecting too much from mapserver?
 >
 > Is there any way around this problem?
 >
 > Does anyone have any suggestions for serving data that is scattered
 > through thousands of files?

 John,

  I think it might make more sense to either produce map objects 
dynamically
  using mapscript, or create one mapfile for each dataset to serve 
rather
 than trying to offer all the products through one master .map file.

 Best regards,
 --
  
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
  I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, 
warmerdam at pobox.com
 light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
 and watch the world go round - Rush | Geospatial Programmer for Rent