Shading Polygons and removing internal boundaries from shapefiles

[Stephen Woodbridge]

Thematic mapping is best done using postgis. You can do multiple tables 
joins and thematic rendering very easily and efficiently. You can do 
some basic stuff with ogr, but I would strongly recommend that you look 
at postgis. The nice thing about mapserver is that you only need to load 
just the polygons and the attributes needed for the thematic mapping and 
all the rest of the data can stay in shapefiles.

-Steve

Ravi wrote:
> Hi David,
> 
> I am not original poster but I have similar requirement.
> 
> I would like to shade polygons based on some data I have in a second 
> .dbf file (or data in a mysql server).
> 
> Thanks for helping
> Ravi
> 
> 
> Fawcett, David wrote:
>> Matt,
>>  
>> For question #1, are you talking about the .dbf that is part of the 
>> shapefile, or a second .dbf that you would like to join to?  
>> For question #2, I would just suggest downloading the legislative 
>> district shapefiles from the MN Legislative GIS Office:  
>> http://www.gis.leg.mn/metadata/leg02.htm  (there is a download link in 
>> the metadata)
>>  
>> David.
>>
>>     -----Original Message-----
>>     *From:* UMN MapServer Users List
>>     [mailto:MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU] *On Behalf Of *Matt Pettis
>>     *Sent:* Monday, October 23, 2006 10:58 AM
>>     *To:* MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU
>>     *Subject:* [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] Shading Polygons and removing
>>     internal boundaries from shapefiles
>>
>>     Hi,
>>          I just installed MapServer because I want to do some graphical
>>     shading of polygons that represent MN voting precints.  I have two
>>     particular questions:
>>          1.  Is there an example mapfile or mapscript that helps me
>>     understand how to shade polygons on a scale based upon a numeric
>>     value in a .dbf file?
>>          2.  I want to graphically show Legislative districts, and I have
>>     voting precint shapefiles.  How do I aggregate precints that belong
>>     to a legislative district and make that one polygon, erasing the
>>     lines that would be internal to this aggregated region?