Opened 13 years ago

Last modified 13 years ago

#3607 assigned enhancement

Add ability to have many metadataURL in WMS Capabilities

Reported by: guillaume Owned by: tomkralidis
Priority: normal Milestone: FUTURE
Component: WMS Server Version: svn-trunk (development)
Severity: normal Keywords: WMS, metadataURL
Cc: dmorissette@…

Description

WMS 1.1.1 specs don't limit the number of metadataURL published throught capabilities. With increasing use of catalogs, it becomes needed that MapServer support this behaviour. I'd suggest to add a specific function in mapows.c. I can probably write it myself, but I need to be sure that this enhancement will be accepted by the community. Regards,

Guillaume

Change History (7)

comment:1 by assefa, 13 years ago

If it is part of the specs, I think the community would accept it, specially if It does not break any backward compatibility. Is there any particular concern I am not catching?

comment:2 by assefa, 13 years ago

Milestone: FUTURE

classifying bugs for the release.

comment:3 by tomkralidis, 13 years ago

Owner: changed from mapserverbugs to tomkralidis
Status: newassigned

How would this look at the user level? Currently, we use LAYER.METADATA/ows_metadata_* to output one MetadataURL per layer. I would initially think a delimited list would help here, but this would break backward compatibility.

To get a better idea, do you have a use case that would demonstrate how a catalog would harvest / merge multiple metadata for one layer in a catalog?

comment:4 by guillaume, 13 years ago

Hi Tom,

Thanks for your feedback. Actually the main goal is to be able to point to different "views" of the metadata document, which would basically be text/xml, text/html application/pdf eventually. The harvesting service should be able to ask for the appropriate representation, while referencing the others for publication convenience. The need comes from my working mate who is a GeoNetwork dev. I've asked him to come back here for further input. Best regards Guillaume

comment:5 by fxp, 13 years ago

Why do we need more than one metadataURL element ? UC :

  • a web WMS client could use the metadataURL with type=text/html to add a link in a layer tree or adding footnotes for layers in a printable PDF map for example,
  • and a catalogue could harvest the service GetCapabilities document and get layer metadata using metadataURL with type=text/xml to get the full XML document to index, search, ...

comment:6 by tomkralidis, 13 years ago

Assefa and I spoke about this last week at the code sprint. I can't see how this could be implemented without breaking backwards compability.

If you have any examples, that would be great.

comment:7 by guillaume, 13 years ago

Not sure, but I remember that all the xxx_url metadata were parsed by a single function (same one for legend, metadata...) which was looking for the keywords in MapServer METADATA and then parsed the associated _url _format and others. Actually it would be enough to loop through instead. I don't think it would break any backward compatibility.

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