On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 5:07 PM, Peter Weilandt <peterweila...@shaw.ca> wrote: > I stumbled across MapServer in my search for a tool to use in a website. I > want to develop a website that will use a coordinate (lat & long), which is > easily obtained from a user on the client side by clicking on a Google map, > and then transferring this coordinate to the server side where it will be > used to sequentially query many (500+) shapefile polygon layers, extracting > the values from 2 fields from each layer at this coordinate, saving these > values in a list (Excel, textfile?), and then using this list to return > values to the user on the client side. This sounds simple in concept, but > is MapServer a tool that can accomplish this and, if so, are there any > examples showing the code to use for such a query?
MapServer certainly has the ability to do attribute queries against multiple shapefiles. MapServer's real strength is rendering (drawing) maps. 500 shapefiles is a lot. Just the overhead of opening 500 files is notable and something that you would generally try to avoid in a web application. I don't usually think of Excel or text files in a web context either. I don't know if this would work in your case, but you might be better served by a spatial database, e.g. PostGIS. You would pass your coordinates thru a PHP (or similar) page to PostGIS which would execute the query and return the results to PHP which would generate HTML. With PostGIS/PostgreSQL you might be able to combine your 500 shapefiles into something more manageable. Rich -- Richard Greenwood richard.greenw...@gmail.com www.greenwoodmap.com _______________________________________________ mapserver-users mailing list mapserver-users@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/mapserver-users