shape as url

[Lowell Filak]

The following message was sent by Andrea Antonello
<andrea.antonello at GMAIL.COM> on Thu, 20 Oct 2005 23:57:21 +0200.

> You are right, the idea would be to cache the file somewhere, if
possible in 
> chunks. 
> 
> Andrea
> 
> 
> > How would that work? There's no random access to URL's they're a stream
> > of data. You can't seek in a file that is a URL.
> >
> > -e
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: UMN MapServer Users List [mailto:MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU] On
> > Behalf Of Andrea Antonello
> > Sent: Thursday, October 20, 2005 10:30 AM
> > To: MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU
> > Subject: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] shape as url
> >
> >
> > Hi,
> > Is there a way to set the map path for shapefiles and grassdatas and
> > whatever
> > as an URL?
> > The idea is to get the stuff working from inside a content management
> > system,
> > where the unix datapath is lost and an url is assigned to it. That would
> > ease
> > the possibility to archive datasets with different views and make them
> > browsable and searchable.

Andrea,

There was a discussion regarding this sort of things a year,2,3... ago
and even a bug filed and closed. But I can't find the bug report now.
Maybe someone could restore it from the old bugzilla backups if deemed
important.?
In the end it was decided that WFS was developed to handle such things
but that WFS provided no means of compressing the data during the
transfer and effectively bloated the data. I think a few people briefly
looked into setting up apache to compress the XML stream to send it
across the wire but the problem was that the data was not compressed on
the fly, it was more like compress->transmit->decompress (whole WFS
result), not in chunks.

Lowell