Mapserver <-> SDE Joins

[Adam Quiney]

Hi all,

We're putting together an application that uses Mapserver to connect to 
an ArcSDE instance running against an SQLServer back-end.

Are joins (i.e. 
http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/docs/reference/mapfile/join) supported with 
ArcSDE connections?  I know the ArcSDE page says "on-the-fly" joins are 
not supported, but I wasn't sure if those referred to the same thing or 
some other SDE-specific join? 

We are currently storing a set of address points in our database.  We 
also have a many-to-one relationship between these address points and 
any number of aliases that they could hold.  We would like to be able to 
perform a join between each address point and all of its aliases.  Is 
this possible on mapserver's end, or are we limited to creating a view 
in SDE that will support this?

Lastly, if this *can* be done in mapserver, is it possible to flatten 
out the aliases so that the final feature that is displayed to the 
browser (and that would be queried upon a get-feature-info request) 
would have all of the attributes of the address point, along with an 
attribute for each attached alias (the alternative being that we have 
one address point/alias feature for each address point and alias pair).

Thanks,

--Adam