[GIS] Modifying a WMS feature in POSTGIS with Openlayers

Question

I have a WMS layer that i'm using to display complex features to the users. It was really the main reason i chose GeoServer, because rendering all the vectors, made it painfully slow. Like GeoServer converts all features to raster tiles things got much faster.

This works fine to visualize the information and i even draw a vector over the selected shape, using the features geometry attributes to highlight it like so:

But I want also to have an edit mode to change the attributes. Like this:

I searched other discussions and everybody is talking about WFS-T to change vectors, and it seems to me a bit strange to limit the editing of features only to vectors.

If one can identify the feature even if it's raster using WMSGetFeatureInfo to create the popup is it so difficult to change its attributes?

I have the id of the selected feature so can one connect and update directly the POSTGIS table? Is this possible?

Update table where id = etc etc ?

What kind of approach do you recommend?

Answer 1

This is not possible with WMS. WFS gives the data itself (READ only), and WFS-T is a transactional extension of WFS that allows you to CREATE/UPDATE/DELETE data through the WFS protocol. In your case, for what you need, you can't use WMS / GetFeatureInfo but you need WFS-T or to use a different approach like JDBC to edit the content of your postgis tables.