[mapserver-users] mapserver/postgis/WFS help

[pcreso at pcreso.com]

Hi,

I'm looking at using mapserver as a WFS server as well as WMS. We don't need WFS-T (yet) & the mapserver implementation seems fine for our needs.

I've been asked to serve a 160Mb shape file (over a 10mb link at best - yes, I know.... but there are good reasons)

To make this more workable, performance wise, I can load the shapefile into PostGIS & use a spatial index, as well as set up a group in the mapfile with scale/zoom dependent layers, selecting mixtures of data subsets & simplified line features as appropriate.

I'm reasonably familiar with this for WMS, but it's my first foray into WFS.


I see in the OGC WFS spec there is the option to pass coords for upper/lower corners in the GetFeatures request, which suggests setting extents is possible, I guess it is up to the client implementation (ESRI in this case) to actually use this capability.

So, a couple of questions (assuming the WFS request includes the upper/lower corners - map extent ):


For WFS layers, will mapserver utilise the spatial index to select/send only features within the current map extent? 

Is the zoom/scale used to turn layers off/on (so the user can select one group & the mapfile will determine which "version" of the data gets sent)
applied to WFS requests as it is for CGI & WMS requests? 


Thanks,

  Brent