randomly assigned COLOR 's?

[Brent Pedersen]

hi,

with a map of the world with country boundaries and
using only the mapserver CGI, is it possible to have the countries  
filled with one of ~5 different colors. either at random or  
uniformly. is there a way to do this in the mapfile without relying  
on attributes in the shapefile?

my fallback solution will be to add a column in the .shp and assign  
number 1 - 5 to each country and use that in a map file EXPRESSION. i  
thought maybe there was another means i was missing. something like  
an automatic alternating color scheme... to help me do less work.

thanks,
-brent