[maplab-users] maplab configuration

[Paul Spencer]

Mark, the tutorial.map file has no IMAGETYPE set, so by default 
MapScript will attempt to produce the output image in GIF format.  I 
suspect you are using precompiled binaries for Windows and these 
probably don't have GIF support.  You can modify the map file to use an 
IMAGETYPE of PNG - this setting is part of the Map object in MapEdit.

For the tmp stuff, the location of the tmp directories is controlled by 
a couple of settings in the Web object of your map file.  The tutorial 
map file is set up to conform to our (DM Solutions Group) convention 
which is:

IMAGEPATH "/tmp/ms_tmp/ " #absolute path to temp directory for mapscript 
files
IMAGEURL "/ms_tmp/" #url to access files in the IMAGE_PATH

This means that there is a tmp directory in the root of the drive that 
you installed apache/mapscript in, in this case c:\ I think.  So you 
would need to have c:\tmp\ms_tmp created.

The IMAGEURL means that your apache configuration understands that the 
path http://<server-url>/ms_tmp/ maps to c:\tmp\ms_tmp, normally on 
windows you would do this using an Alias /ms_tmp/ "c:\tmp\ms_tmp\" in 
your httpd.conf file.

You  can set up any "ms_tmp" directory and url, but you will need to 
make sure that your map file and you httpd.conf file are set up correctly.

Your maplab configuration files have a TMP_IMG_PATH and a TMP_MAP_PATH 
setting.  These are somewhat independent of the mapfile settings but we 
do expect that the paths exist.  Normally, I would set these two values 
to be c:\tmp.  Be aware that MapLab saves temporary copies of your 
mapfile while you are working on it, and if you put TMP_MAP_PATH in a 
web-accessible directory then there is a potential for someone to access 
a copy of your mapfile and use that to guess path information on your 
computer, this may be a potential security problem.

Cheers,

Paul

Mark Balman wrote:

>Hi
>
>I have successfully installed, built and run an application using Mapserver
>3.6 on Win 98 / Apache platform and would like to try using maplab to spruce
>it up. I have successfully installed php 4.2.1 and 3.62 mapscript dll. I
>have installed this according to the instructions and maplab into
>c:\apache\apache\htdocs\maplab. I can get to the maplab index page ok. I
>have tried to open the tutorial map file in mapedit which displays all the
>parameters but when I try and open the page in mapbrowser everything goes
>wrong i.e.MapServer Error in msSaveImage() /tutorial/tmp *.gif with Failed
>writing image to /tutorial/tmp *.gif . I think this might be my paths
>settings.. can anyone enlighten me as to where these should be pointing? is
>c:\apache\apache\htdocs\maplab\tutorial\tmp\ the correct path to show for
>the map/image/urls???
>
>thanks in advance
>
>Mark
>
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