<p class="MsoNormal">Hi list,</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Perhaps since I have two different problems I should be
posting more than one message, but we'll start with this and see where it leads.
I've been working for the last several months on a map-based interface for a
database of geophysical data.<span style=""> </span>The idea
is for the user to view groups of surveys, by vendor, on an interactive map and
be able to click on an individual survey to bring up a new page with
information about vintage, data spacing, vendor notes, etc.<span style=""> </span>I chose kamaps as my interface because I'm
new to open source and not comfortable with a lot of programming.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">My first question is about tileindexing.<span style=""> </span>Though my maps cover North America, the
surveys I am displaying on the map (using shape files of various vintages) can
cover multiple territories/states down to only a few counties.<span style=""> </span>When I precache the tiles, some of the groups
will end up containing one or two images that contain anything along with
thousands of blank tiles.<span style=""> </span>I'm not
exactly sure how much of a performance issue this is, but it just seems
inefficient, so I looked around for solutions and ran across TILEINDEX on the
Mapserver website.<span style=""> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">From the information available, I believe the idea behind
tileindex is that for the indexed layers the index shapefile is loaded and only
if the mbrs from the index file are within the mapextents will the actual shape
file be called.<span style=""> </span>I thought this might
help when I run precache because I THOUGHT for every tile, tile.php is calculating
the extents for the tile and sending a request to Mapserver for that
extent/group, so since it wouldn't load the shape file it wouldn't make the
tile.<span style=""> </span>Clearly I don't have a good
understanding of what is happening here, because I still end up with the exact
same number of tiles whether I use TILEINDEX or<span style="">
</span>a straight DATA configuration.<span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span>Any suggestions here would be
appreciated.<span style=""> </span>I had also hoped to use
this tileindex to limit the legend entries based on the viewport extents, but
obviously Mapserver returns the layer legend information whether or not it
loads the data for that layer.<span style=""> </span>If
someone has some ideas for this, I'd be thrilled to learn about them.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">My second, more pressing problem regards precaching.<span style=""> </span>I don't have any reference to imageformat in
my map files and I have the format set to PNG in my config.php file.<span style=""> </span>When I run precache.php on my files, it
creates pngs.<span style=""> </span>It looks like init.php is
supposed to default to whatever format is in the config file, but when I run
kamaps with the $tileSource = 'auto', it is creating new tiles in a gif format
and when I try to switch to $tileSource = 'cache', it just doesn't load at
all.<span style=""> </span>I cannot figure how which script is
setting the format to gif files.<span style=""> </span>I
prefer pngs, but I guess I can switch to GIF in the config file if that's the
only solution. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Thanks in advance for any advice you can offer.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Michelle Schulze</p>