= !MapGuide RFC 107 - Enhance Tile service to add a new API !GenerateTile  =

This page contains a change request (RFC) for the !MapGuide Open Source project.  
More !MapGuide RFCs can be found on the [wiki:MapGuideRfcs RFCs] page.


== Status == 
 
||RFC Template Version||(1.0)|| 
||Submission Date||July 23, 2010||
||Last Modified||Ted Yang July 23, 2010||
||Author||Ted Yang||
||RFC Status||draft||
||Implementation Status||incomplete||
||Proposed Milestone||2.3||
||Assigned PSC guide(s)|| ||
||'''Voting History'''||||
||+1||||
||+0||||
||-0||||
||-1||||
||Abstained||||
 
== Overview ==

This RFC proposes to add a NEW !GenerateTile() API to the tile service. This new API will generate the tile on the server but not get the image from server.

== Motivation ==
MapGuide users want to allow easy pre-seeding of base map tiles, for example, to generate all the tiles of a map at one time, now they can call the API GetTile:

Existing API:
{{{
    MgByteReader* GetTile(MgResourceIdentifier* mapDefinition,CREFSTRING baseMapLayerGroupName,INT32 tileColumn,INT32 tileRow,INT32 scaleIndex);
}}} 

There's one problem with this existing API, suppose the user run a tool(like Maestro MgCooker) on the client PC to generate all the tiles of a map, the client will get the tile image from the server.
Actually the user just want to generate the tiles on the server to make the rendering/navigation of a map more smooth. But the transfer of the tile image will increase the cost to finish this job(usually thousands of tiles will be generate).
So this RFC want to add a NEW API !GenerateTile() which generate the tile on the server and return a bool value.


== Proposed Solution ==

Create a NEW !GenerateTile() API which return a bool value to indicate the tile generation is successful or not.

Proposed NEW API:
{{{
    bool GenerateTile(MgResourceIdentifier* mapDefinition,CREFSTRING baseMapLayerGroupName,INT32 tileColumn,INT32 tileRow,INT32 scaleIndex);
}}} 

== Implications ==

This change will NOT break existing API compatibility.

== Test Plan ==

 * !Build/Run on !Windows/Linux
 * New Unit test for !GenerateTile will be added

== !Funding/Resources ==

Supplied by Autodesk.