Map file as database

[Norman Barker]

-----Original Message-----
From: UMN MapServer Users List [mailto:MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU]On
Behalf Of Till Adams
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2005 9:14 AM
To: MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU
Subject: Re: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] Map file as database


Kralidis,Tom [Burlington] wrote:
> I've been thinking about this for awhile now.  It would be great to have a database with at least common objects which can get perl'd into a mapfile on demand.  We have many mapfiles working off of one server.  If we want to change our LEGEND object globally, it'd be alot easier to do this from a db2mapfile routine.
> 
> ..Tom
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: UMN MapServer Users List [mailto:MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU] On Behalf Of Raphael Teixeira
> Sent: Thursday, 14 July, 2005 12:46
> To: MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU
> Subject: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] Map file as database
> 
> 
> Hello All,
> 
>    Has anyone modeled the dot map file as database?? I wanna access my map definition from a database not a dot map file.
> 
> Thanks in advice,
> 

Tom (and all),

as Dorileo pointed out a few minutes ago, there is the "mapstorer 
project" (right now there is v 0.3), which stores the whole mapfile in a 
mysql database.

So maybe it's worth giving it a try.

Go to www.mapstorer.org or look at sourceforge (or contact Olaf - look 
in "CC", he's the project-coordinator)

Greets, Till

-- 

Mit freundlichen Grüssen aus Bonn,

Till Adams



Depending on your needs, it can be really easy just to create a database and use a XSL Stylesheet.

Using Apache Xalan you can query directly into your database from the XSL file (http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j/extensionslib.html#sql) making life really easy.

For our project we have used Hypersonic SQL database, and Xalan, and a simple data ingestion tool that collects
some simple metadata about the experiment files, the associated user priveleges that are set up in Apache by the tool, and
then when it converts the file to geotiff it inserts a row in the database table.  To ensure the map file integrity, the stylesheet is run against the whole table every time to create the map file.

Mapstorer looks really good though, will have to try it on our next project.

Norman