WMS Server: Filtering Raster/Vector data based on request params

[Jeremy Nix]

Is it possible to submit a GetMap request that performs a filtering 
mechanism on the fly?  In Geoserver, it is possible to pass an 
additional parameter "FILTER" that accepts an OGC formatted filter 
string where it is feasible to do commands like "PropertyIsEqualTo".  I 
have a large shapefile that I built using the MosaicIndexBuilder from 
the Geoserver project.  The image files that make up this shapefile are 
not uniform in size, density, or color model.  These images have 
surrounding borders and legends that will overlap other images.  If we 
were dealing with only a handful of images I would set up the individual 
files separately as different layers.  As it is, we have over 100K 
images that fit this profile, so we've opted to go with the shapefile 
solution.  As the images have been named using specific naming 
conventions, we wanted to see if we could pass a request parameter to do 
something like this:

FILTER=<ogc:Filter><ogc:PropertyIsEqualTo><ogc:PropertyName>location</ogc:PropertyName><ogc:Literal>FILENAME</ogc:Literal></ogc:PropertyIsEqualTo></ogc:Filter>

Is this possible.  If not, does anyone have a suggestion on how I can 
implement this.  I was worried about the negative performance that would 
most likely be involved with have a map file that consisted of 100K+ 
layers for all of our image files. 

Thanks in advance for any help.

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__________________________________
Jeremy Nix
Senior Application Developer
Southwest Financial Services, Ltd.
(513) 621-6699