Storing MapFile objects in SQL database

[Stephan Holl]

Hello Etienne,

On Wed, 10 May 2006 23:29:36 -0400 Etienne Dube <etdube at GMAIL.COM>
wrote:

> Hi everybody,
> 
> Is there a straightforward way to store MapFile objects in a
> relational database? I'm working on a project using MapServer,
> Chameleon and PostgreSQL+PostGIS, and I need to do some rather funky
> things when displaying maps. For example, we have a database with
> many different classes of measures taken at various sites. Indicators
> can be dynamically calculated from one or many measures (with SQL
> queries) and used for thematic mapping. Each indicator has its own
> classes for symbology, so what I'm doing now is creating a layer with
> the associated classes for each one.
> 
> Needless to say, my MapFiles get unwieldy pretty fast, with lots of 
> redundant definitions (same class labels and styles repeated in each 
> layer). I don't even need to display more than one indicator at a
> time, in fact it'd be better if I could offer a drop-down box to
> choose which one to map (I've already been able to implement similar
> functionality in parameterizable queries handled with some PHP and
> Mapscript kung-fu for choosing the data's year, so I figure I should
> be able to do the same for pretty much any object accessible by
> Mapscript).
> 
> I'm thinking about storing all the NAME, DATA (pulling stuff from
> pgSQL with queries), *SCALE, CLASS, LABEL and STYLE items in the
> database (pgSQL) for my indicator "layers", so it's easier to manage
> and use along with PHP/Mapscript. I was wondering if anybody has done
> the same thing before. Is there any open-source code available meant
> to do something similar? If not, are there any known issues or
> pitfalls with such an approach?

Have you looked at mapstorer[1]? OK, its MySQL-based...


best regards

	Stephan

[1] http://www.mapstorer.org