Raster Data Access documentation

[Ed McNierney]

Frank -

Oh, good point - I'm not sure whether another datastore is actually
supported (I've never tried), although I also recall a PostGIS
discussion or question.  I assumed that Denis' question was about using
a different file format (such as a text file or a spreadsheet or
something), but that might not be the case.

Denis, is there a particular storage format you'd like to use, or is
there a reason you'd like to avoid shapefiles?

	- Ed

Ed McNierney
President and Chief Mapmaker
TopoZone.com / Maps a la carte, Inc.
73 Princeton Street, Suite 305
North Chelmsford, MA  01863
Phone: +1 (978) 251-4242
Fax: +1 (978) 251-1396
ed at topozone.com 

-----Original Message-----
From: UMN MapServer Users List [mailto:MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU] On
Behalf Of Frank Warmerdam
Sent: Thursday, April 20, 2006 9:48 PM
To: MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU
Subject: Re: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] Raster Data Access documentation

Ed McNierney wrote:
> Denis -
> 
> No, it cannot - it needs to be stored in a shapefile.  The shapefile 
> holds both the list of the raster file names and the geographic 
> bounding box for each raster file.  That's the "index" part - the 
> shapefile allows MapServer to use it as an index to quickly determine 
> which raster images in the layer may be needed for the current
map-drawing request.
> Raster files that couldn't possibly be needed are ignored.

Denis writes:
> Does somebody know why the Raster Data Access documentation says in 
> the third sentence
> 
> http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/docs/howto/raster_data/#rasters-and-tile-
> in
> dexing
> The list of files forming a layer can be stored in a shapefile
> 
> Can the file be store to something else than a shapefile?

Ed / Denis,

I believe the tileindex for rasters can be in a shapefile (directly
reference) or in any other supported datastore when referencing another
layer as the tileindex.  I think there was some recent discussion of
folks using a Postgis layer for this for instance.

Best regards,
-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam,
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