Tiling shapefiles

[Stephen Woodbridge]

Chip Taylor wrote:
> I am running Mapserver 4.6 on Windows using IIS.  The data presently 
> focuses on the United states.  I have a single mapfile that contains the 
> layers to be rendered.  The majority of my data is in ESRI Shapefile 
> format.  Most of the data is in national datasets.  However, some data 
> is only available by state or county.  For example, the hydro data is 
> national but pipeline data is by state.  How would I most efficiently 
> organize the state data so that the mapserver can seamlessly display the 
> data when the geo extents allow?  Is there a tutorial somewhere on 
> tiling shapefile data?

Chip,

You can organize it any way you want, for example by state, by layer, by 
vendor, etc. The trick is to get all the files for a given layer into a 
metafile that can be used to create the tileindex.

pipeline-meta.txt
--------------------------
al/pipeline.shp
ak/pipeline.shp
etc

-or-

pipeline/al.shp
pipeline/ak.shp
etc

then:

tile4ms pipeline-meta.txt pipeline-tile
shptree pipeline-tile

and you in your mapfile

TILEINDEX "pipeline-tile"

-Steve W