Sean Gillies Blog
More WxS Hinting From Feeds

705More WxS Hinting From Feeds

2008-03-09T06:31:48Z

Looking back, I realize I forgot to mention an easy way to help ordinary web clients find and tap into WMS from a feed: HTML forms. Here's a feed entry representing a form:

<entry>
  <title>GetMap Form</title>
  <summary>Easy entry point to a web map service</summary>
  <link
    rel="alternate"
    type="text/html"
    href="http://example.com/getmap-form.html"
    />
  ...
</entry>

where getmap-form.html is:

<html>
  ...
  <form method="GET" action="http://example.com/wms">
    <input type="hidden" name="service" value="WMS"/>
    <input type="hidden" name="request" value="GetMap"/>
    <input type="text" name="layers" value="layer1,layer2"/>
    <input type="text" name="bbox" value="-180.0,-90.0,180.0,90.0"/>
  ...
  </form>
</html>

For a more concrete (though not exactly WMS) example, see this form.

Comments

1Re: More WxS Hinting From Feeds

Jeroen Ticheler, 2008-03-10T08:39:45Z

Hi Sean, Thanks for some great input! I removed my URI Template stuff from the feed again and now included a full GetMap request producing a PNG file and added a link with only the basic information and a (custom) hint. That should work for people that want to consume the feed information and exploit the W*S services. The above is also a great idea, although it is tied to a specific client and that's something I hope not to do to make it easy for other clients to use the resources in a clean way. I may still include it though :-) Ciao, Jeroen

2Re: More WxS Hinting From Feeds

Sean, 2008-03-10T14:50:41Z

Tied to a specific client? Not really: there's a very wide range and huge number of web clients that handle HTML forms. There's nothing out there that handles the hints in your links. Specifically, I did a GET on one of your alternate links and it gave me a service exception document (along with a completely misleading HTTP "200 OK" status). Web clients expect dereferenceable, not bogus, URIs in a link.

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