randomly assigned COLOR 's?

[Fawcett, David]

Brent, 

Since your countries shapefile likely won't change very often, I would
go with your fallback solution.  

It is always faster to pre-class your data.  

David.

-----Original Message-----
From: UMN MapServer Users List [mailto:MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU] On
Behalf Of Brent Pedersen
Sent: Friday, April 21, 2006 11:41 AM
To: MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU
Subject: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] randomly assigned COLOR 's?


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