MS RFC 74: Includes from non-file connections (eg Databases)¶

Date: 2011/07/29
Author: Michael Smith, Daniel Morissette
Contact: michael.smith at usace.army.mil, dmorissette at mapgears.com
Last Edited: 09/17/2011
Status: Draft
Version: TBD

1. Overview¶

MapServer 4.10 introduced the concept of INCLUDE files. When this directive is encountered parsing switches to the included file immediately. As a result the included file can be comprised of any valid mapfile syntax. For example, one could write:

INCLUDE 'myLayer.map'

This would include the contents in the mapfile at runtime.

It would be useful to extend this to allow INCLUDEs from database connections. This provides another mechanism for dynamic mapfiles without requiring MapScript.

2. The proposed solution¶

This RFC proposes to add a new DBINCLUDE mapfile item. This item would have a number of associated mapfile items including:

CONNECTIONTYPE CONNECTION DATA INCLUDEITEM FILTER METADATA

And be closed with an END keyword.

Example

DBINCLUDE
  CONNECTIONTYPE oraclespatial
  CONNECTION "%uid%/%passwd%@tns_connection"
  DATA "MAPLAYER_TABLE_NAME"
  INCLUDEITEM "MAPLAYERS"
  FILTER "condition=%layer_variable%"
  METADATA
     "layer_variable_validation_pattern"  "^condition1|condition2$"
  END
END

The only new item, beside the DBINCLUDE keyword, is the INCLUDEITEM. It defines the attribute from which to to pull the layers definitions. It functions similarly to TILEITEM.

Allowed CONNECTIONTYPEs would include OGR, POSTGIS, ORACLESPATIAL.

An Example of the query would be

select maplayers from maplayer_table_name where condition = condition1;

The content of the MAPLAYERS content would be strings to include in the mapfile just and INCLUDE would do. One difference is that the query could return a resultset of strings to add, and would be equivalent to N INCLUDE statements.

2.5 Use Cases¶

A common use case is providing a custom classed layer for an individual. Currently, this is very difficult to do without MapScript.

For example, in a table one column would be username and the second column would be the layer class level text string.

Example Table¶
user	class
jeff	CLASS Name “Jeff Layer” STYLE OUTLINECOLOR 255 0 0 SYMBOL 0 COLOR 0 0 255 END END
daniel	CLASS Name “Daniel Layer” STYLE OUTLINECOLOR 122 180 200 SYMBOL 0 END END
steve	CLASS Name “Steve Layer” EXPRESSION “type=brewery” STYLE SYMBOL 0 COLOR 0 255 255 WIDTH 4 END END

Another common case is dynamically classifying a layer as the data changes. With SQL, a text string can be calculated on the fly from the data itself, by looking at the DISTINCT values of a dataset to generate the classes that will be used to display that data.

3. Implementation Details¶

3.1 Files affected¶

The following files will be modified/created by this RFC:

mapfile.c
mapogr.c
maplayer.c
maplexer.l
mapparser.y

3.2 MapScript Issues¶

There should be no mapscript issues, this is really only useful for CGI

3.3 Security Issues¶

The security issues should be the same as any existing database connection layer

3.4 Backwards Compatibility Issues¶

This change provides a new functionality with no backwards compatibility issues being considered.

4. Bug ID¶

None assigned.

5. Voting history¶

None

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