[mapserver-users] Re: Hiding overviews

[Eichner, Andreas - SID-NLK]

Hello Armin,

> If you don't mind using Python MapScript instead of the Mapserver CGI
then you 
> could try to use this Python class that uses the OWSRequest 
> functionality of Mapserver/Mapscript:

although this is a nice approach, I can't go with Python. We need a high
performance WMS and I believe that the snake can not fulfill our
expectations. Well, in the meantime I patched the MapServer code a
little bit and made it being an Apache module, reading and parsing the
map file only once on startup. This is much faster than the good old CGI
and seems to work fine...

> It modifies the map object before the output of the GetCapabilities 
> response. For a group of layers always the first one in the map file
is 
> used as the one visible to the clients for the capabilities. In 
> addition, only the layers that have a 'ows_title' metadata tag are 
> included in the response.

In an earlier mail in this thread I stated that IMHO there's a problem
with the MapServer code. I modified the stated things and now it does
the same thing: only giving a <Title> if 'ows_title' metadata is given.

> And with an Apache rewrite rule the URL's can 
> be set to look a bit nicer. Some more details are in the README file.

Well, another annoying thing which is resolved by the module solution.
Now the Apache setup is something like:

 <Location "/wms">
   SetHandler "wms"
   WMS_Map "/srv/wms/wms.map"
 </Location>

resulting in a simple URI like
http://localhost/wms?service=WMS&request=GetCapabilities. So with little
work I solved three issues for me: speed, URI niceness and overview
layer grouping. Well, several nice ideas came to daylight but I will go
with mine.

Thanks to you and all helpers involved.