[Chameleon] Trying to get Chameleon Installed - round 2

[Paul Spencer]

Steve,

comments in line ...

woodbri@swoodbridge.com wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I'm trying to get Chameleon installed and grabbed the latest tar 
> files from maptools.org. Running RH8.0, PHP-4.3.2-rc2, MS 4.0 
> (probably pre-release).
> 
> I have narrowed down my problems with the sample applications to the 
> following two:
> 
> 1) I get a Server 500 error that is being caused by the Scalebar 
> widget. If i change the cwc2 tag to cwc3 on the scalebar widget the 
> page loads fine without the scalebar, but leave it as cwc2 and it 
> dies.

um.  if you right-click on where the scalebar image *should be* and get 
the image url, you can copy that url to a separate tab/window and load 
the scalebar image directly.  This may give you some error messages.

> 2) I can not get the key map to display. I thought it might be a path 
> problem so I set the IMAGE= tag to the absolute web path (not file 
> system path), but that didn't work. and when I look at the page 
> source it is calling drawmap.php to generate the image which seems 
> strange if you are passing an image location.

The keymap image needs to be a filesystem path, and it should be able to 
be either absolute or relative to the template if provided in the 
template, or relative to the map file if set in the map file.  It uses 
drawmap.php because we are manually rendering the extents box to account 
for differences in projection between the current image and the 
projection that the keymap was rendered in.  This may be a bit flaky 
right now.

> 
> A couple of other comments on installing the chameleon that are 
> probably just the fact that I didn't read all of the docs on 
> installing it, but I think you should clean these up anyway to make 
> it more user friendly:
> 
> 1) you have a lot of hard coded paths in the code and the sample app, 
> just grep for ms4w. I think I found occurrences in the map file, 
> index.phtml, session.php

the sample app is a work in progress.  We'll try to accomodate your 
comments here.  I believe the paths are absolute in the map file because 
of a problem we are having getting mapserver to use relative paths 
correctly, still not sure if that is a mapserver problem or a chameleon 
problem.

> 2) you also have assumptions that the sample images are located at 
> /chameleon_demo/images but the sample untar's into 
> chameleon_sample/htdocs/images which does not have to be at the users 
> web root as is my case.

The sample assumes that there is a /chameleon_demo/ alias in the web 
server which points to chameleon_sample/htdocs/.  If this is set up then 
the image references work :)  We'll work on this too.

> 
> I would recommend moving these definitions into one file that you can 
> tell the user to edit as part of the install process.

This should not be necessary (at least, beyond telling the sample where 
chameleon is installed).

> 
> So I got farther than last time, and any suggestions on debugging the 
> Scalebar issue would be appreciated.
> 
> Thanks for providing a very cool product,
>   -Stephen Woodbridge
> _______________________________________________
> Chameleon mailing list
> Chameleon@lists.maptools.org
> http://lists.maptools.org/mailman/listinfo/chameleon
> 

Cheers,

Paul

-- 
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|Paul Spencer                           spencer@dmsolutions.ca    |
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|Applications & Software Development                              |
|DM Solutions Group Inc                 http://www.dmsolutions.ca/|
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