Mapping Hacks

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Chapter 8, Building the Geospatial Web

#91 Build Interactive Web-Based Map Applications

HACK

Now we can add another layer for our coffee shop, after the coffee_wifi

symbol and before our final end tag:

layer

name beehive

type point

status default

class

color 0 0 255

symbol "coffee_wifi"

size 15

label

position ur

size medium

color 0 0 255

outlinecolor 255 255 255

end

end

feature

points -79.98403 40.42775 end

text "Beehive"

end

end

Note how we use the coffee_wifi symbol that we defined earlier, but we set

the size and color here. We also set the position of the label to

ur, or upper

right of the symbol.

The feature section defines an individual point. We can add multiple fea-

ture blocks, each with the points (longitude first, as usual) and text (name or

label). You should now see a blue dot labeled “Beehive” on the South Side of

Pittsburgh, as shown in Figure 8-12.

MapServer does a heck of a lot more than this: raster layers, on-the-fly

reprojection, automatic labeling, TrueType fonts, layer queries, attribute fil-

tering, database lookups, and more. Obviously, the next step is to tailor the

images to your liking by tweaking your map file and the corresponding

HTML. We’ll look a little more into this in “Map Wardriving (and other!)

Data with MapServer”

[Hack #92].

See Also

http://terrasip.gis.umn.edu/projects/tutorial/

MapServer tutorial

http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/doc/getstarted-howto.html

Getting ...