Symbolization tests - volunteers needed...

[Ken Lord]

Hi Steve,

There's one symbol combination that I know needs to be looked at. I've
been meaning to drop a note to the list about this.

Line features, or outlines of polygons:
- symbolized using a cartoline symbol
- with ANTIALIAS TRUE set within the Style object of the layer class
being drawn with the cartoline symbol (not within the symbol
definition, I haven't tried it that way).

The documentation does not explicitly state not to use antialias in
this situation.

This symbolization combination has caused:
- some of the infamous random CGI errors back to at least MapServer 4.6.
- random failure of map images created in mode=map such as static maps
generated using a mapserver URL in the SRC of an HTML IMG tag, this
goes back to MapServer 4.4.
- failure of HTML legend templates to be processed / added to your web
page when the offending layers are turned on, back to MapServer 4.6.

Some time ago I filed a bug on the third item, but it was only just
recently with the release of mapserver 4.8.1 that I finally realized
that this one mistake in my syntax was causing all the above problems.

Symbolizing lines this way in older versions of mapserver actually
worked producing nice results. The random nature of the failures just
left me guessing after upgrading through 4.4 to 4.6 until 4.8.1 came
out.

MapServer 4.8.1 seems to be more strict (or sensitive) to this syntax
mistake, and crashes giving the CGI error far more consistently, which
finally allowed me to isolate the problem I was having with certain
map layers. Removing my improper use of antialias ended all the above
problems.

I run MapServer as a Windows CGI, through IIS, on Windows XP Pro SP2
and Windows Server 2003.

Thanks,
Ken Lord
Vancouver BC

On 3/15/06, Steve Lime <steve.lime at dnr.state.mn.us> wrote:
> Hi all: Just a short note asking if there are any users out there that might be interested in helping put together a series of test cases that cover the spectrum of symbolization options in MapServer. There are so many it's difficult to keep track of the impact of changes in the code.
>
> So, what I'd like to do is try and cover as many combinations as possible in a test suite, but need help to do that. Please contact me if interested. Thanks!
>
> Steve
>