Mapping Hacks

Map Wardriving (and other!) Data with MapServer #92

Chapter 8, Building the Geospatial Web

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469

HACK

This line takes the output of the previous line from the script and creates our

final command:

./shpadd wiscan -122.15488 37.49284 ; ./dbfadd wiscan "QueenFleeWee"

It does this by printing the shpadd WiScan, followed by the rest of the first

“field” that was passed in. The default field separator is whitespace, but you

can use

-F to set the field separator. In this case, we set it to ),soweget

everything up to the

)BSS(.

Map This Shapefile!

Throw the shapefiles into your data directory [Hack #91], and then add a layer

to an existing map file:

layer

name wiscan

type point

status default

data "wiscan.shp"

labelitem "name"

class

label

size tiny

color 255 0 0

end

color 0 0 255

end

end

This layer contains only simple parameters, enough to get the layer to dis-

play. Note the

labelitem entry, and the label class. These control the label

display. In our case, we are using the SSID name, which is extracted from

the .dbf file and stored in the

name field. The label will be red (R = 255, G =

0, B = 0), and the dot marking the station will be blue (R = 0, G = 0, B =

255).

A thorough reference to map-file syntax can be found in the MapServer doc-

umentation (http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu).

Hacking the Hack: Adding Aerial Photographs

Once you’ve set up MapServer and have a few shapefiles going, you might

want to use aerial ...