On Tue, Aug 21, 2007 at 12:44:49PM +0200, Ottavio Campana wrote: > I'm sorry this mail is not very in topic, but I hope you can help me. Just so you know, perhaps a better list to contact with this is the MapServer mailing list at http://lists.umn.edu/archives/mapserver-users.html, or maybe the PostGIS list at http://www.postgis.org/mailman/listinfo/postgis-users. > I'm trying to learn how postgis and mapserver work together, but I > cannot understand nearly anything. I mean, I read the documentation of > postgis and I think I understood it, but I cannot do anything useful > with it. I think before you try to do something customized with python you should get familiar the mapserver MAP file which contains all the instructions to map features from various sources like shape files, MapInfo TAB files, PostGIS data sources, and so on. An example for mapping a layer from a PostGIS source in a MAP file looks like this: LAYER NAME states TYPE POLYGON STATUS ON CONNECTION "user=gisuser password=******* dbname=us_data host=localhost port=5432" CONNECTIONTYPE POSTGIS DATA "the_geom from states" CLASSITEM 'name' PROJECTION "+proj=latlong +datum=WGS84" END CLASS NAME "US States" OUTLINECOLOR 0 0 0 COLOR 255 255 196 END END The key bits here related to PostGIS are the CONNECTION, where you specify all the info needed to get access to your PostgreSQL database, the CONNECTIONTYPE which you set to POSTGIS, and the DATA directive in which you supply a string that contains the SQL expression that pulls out the geometry features you want to map. If you do this with python, then you would first need to create an instance of a mapObj, and then create a layerObj and add it to the map object, setting the properties for the connection. However, my knowledge of this approach is still very sketchy. Documentation is spread around, but the two sites you should peruse are the MapServer docs at: http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/docs and the PostGIS docs at: http://postgis.refractions.net/docs/. - Bill Thoen ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: don't forget to increase your free space map settings
