"Capturing" mapserver images

[Stephen Davies]

Thank you Gail.

I think this may well be what I need - though I would probably use PERL 
Mapscript rather than PHP because of the need to do a deal of 
"off-line" manipulation as well as generating the maps and I feel more 
comfortable with PERL for "batch" processes.

I hadn't realised that Mapscript was quite so powerful.

Thanks also for the hotscripts link. I haven't been there before either.

Cheers,
Stephen

On Tuesday 14 March 2006 02:31, Gail Long wrote:
> Stephen,
>
> I did something similar to what you want to do by showing distrbution
> of some point objects over the period of 6 months.
>
> I used phpmapscript to generate images based on a postgres query and
> saved them to a location other than the default
>
> while($queryresults)
> {
> //process the query//
> $counter++;
> ...
> ...
> ...
> $image_url="/var/www/htdocs/imageslides".$image->saveWebImage() .'_'
> . $counter;
> }
>
> That way I had all of the images in that folder with a suffix of _1
> _2 _3 and so on.  Then I use one of about a billion javascript, java,
> or flash slide generators that are prebuilt and very configureable.
>
> I saved to .gif format for a smaller download and my map "paints"
> over a period of time configured in the slide generator.  I'm
> probably going to have a more specific flash slide show generator
> written for me because I'm not that good at it, but for what I think
> you want there are tons of really good alternatives.
>
> So, prebuild your images, then pass them to a prebuilt package to do
> the display.  It saves system overhead and makes it much faster to
> for downloading.
>
> Here is a list of many slideshow components:
> http://www.hotscripts.com/search/9118335.html
>
> Most are free and there are some very nice flash show builders as
> well that allow you to pass a list of images to it for display.
>
> Gail
> --
> Things are only difficult while you don't understand them.
>
> >Quoting Stephen Davies <sdc at SDC.COM.AU>:
> >>Greetings.
> >>
> >>I need to be able to present a series of maps for "time lapse"
> >> display.
> >>
> >>The PostgreSQL database behind the mapserver application in
> >> question contains both geometry and time-based attribute values
> >> and the map file currently used to display the data uses layers,
> >> filters and classes to colour geometries according to current
> >> attribute values.
> >>
> >>The idea is to somehow capture the images showing the geometry
> >> states at, for example, noon each day for the past month and then
> >> use javascript to display those images as a "movie" similar to
> >> those provided by many weather bureaux.
> >>
> >>I have tried doing it simply by pausing in the browser between
> >> repaint requests but there is too much variability between
> >> browsers and - in particular - between broadband and dialup users.
> >>
> >>I know I could achieve the objective by writing a PERL or Java
> >> program to emulate a browser, retrieve the output image name and
> >> ignore the output but wondered if there were a simpler method such
> >> as invoking mapserver in map mode from a shell.
> >>
> >>Any suggestions and/or advice would be most welcome.
> >>
> >>Cheers and thanks,
> >>Stephen Davies
> >>--
> >>===================================================================
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> >>
> >>Stephen Davies Consulting                            Voice: 08-8177
> >> 1595 Adelaide, South Australia.                             Fax:
> >> 08-8177 0133 Computing & Network solutions.                      
> >> Mobile:0403 0405 83

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Stephen Davies Consulting                            Voice: 08-8177 1595
Adelaide, South Australia.                             Fax: 08-8177 0133
Computing & Network solutions.                       Mobile:0403 0405 83