[OpenLayers-Users] Problems with WMS server

[Trond Michelsen]

On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 11:51:03AM -0400, Ian Turton wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 11:35 AM, Camilo Vargas<cavargasru at gmail.com> wrote:
>> And I got the image. Basically, from this I concluded that the problem is
>> with the "%2F" generated by openlayers instead of the "/" and the same with
>> the "%3A" instead of ":".
> You need to fix your WMS as it is required by the standard to support
> encoded URLs (AFAIR)

Actually, the standard explicitly says it shouldn't be encoded.

--8<--
6.2.1  Reserved characters in HTTP GET URLs

The URL specification [IETF RFC 2396] reserves particular characters
as significant and requires that these be escaped when they might
conflict with their defined usage. The present WMS specification
explicitly reserves several of these characters for use in the query
portion of HTTP GET requests. When the characters "?", "&", "=", "/",
":" and "," appear in one of the roles defined in Table 1, they are to
appear literally in the URL.  When such characters appear elsewhere
(for example, in the value of a parameter), they are to be encoded as
defined in [IETF RFC 2396].

Table 1:
Char  Reserved Usage
  ?   Separator indicating start of query string.
  &   Separator between parameters in query string.
  =   Separator between name and value of parameter.
  /   Separator between MIME type and subtype in format parameter value.
  :   Separator between Namespace and Identifier in SRS parameter value.
  ,   Separator between individual values in list-oriented parameters.
--8<--

In this case the / is used as a separator in a format parameter value,
and it's actually wrong of openlayers to encode it. 

The tricky part is to get openlayers to apply different encoding rules
to each value depending on which parameter it belongs to.

-- 
Trond Michelsen