[GIS] PHP MapScript API Development for MapServer

mapserverPHPwebweb-mapping

PHP MapScript Tutorial
I'd like to use the PHP MapScript API and am curious how others have successfully used it to produce a site that serves up remote sensing data. I've got land surface temperatures, emissivities, and reflectances I'd like to share via a mapserver. I've already installed mapserver on an apache webserver and have also installed the MapScript shared library. What is a good development environment to use for PHP MapScript development? Any example sites that use PHP MapScript people know of? How useful is the MapScript API and how easy is it to use? Thanks in advance!

Best Answer

I will try to answer to each question separately, starting from the development enviroment: I guess any IDE that supports php will work for PHP mapscript development. I can't suggest any because I don't use php, just google 'php ide'.

As for example sites I should point you to the two most popular Open Source web applications built with PHP/mapscript:

p.mapper : probably the best one, actively mantained and with the most comprehensive feature set
cartoweb : outdated, still pretty good (for learning the api at least)

With regards to your last question I think that the Mapscript API is probably not the easiest to use, mostly because it's very powerful and documentation still has to catch up for some areas that have recently changed. Other than that I think an average developer should be able to be up and running within days and, if there are any problems, the mailing list and the #mapserver IRC channel are both active.

Related Solutions

[GIS] PHP MapScript get feature / shape by index in layer

I found that there actually is a method for querying by Index in the layerObj
$layerObj->queryByIndex(???, $fid)
where ??? is probably the tileIndex of a layer object.

Maybe I missed it in the documentation, but I am pretty sure that it is not there. I only found a int queryByIndex(....) in the mapObj section, but none in the layerObj section of the Mapserver Mapscript documentation.

So here is a summary of the method;

// query my layerObj ($layer) by my index valu ($myFID)
$layer->queryByIndex(0,$myFID);
// gets the first result, unique obviously because I query a single index ($myFID)
$result = $layer->getResult(0); 
// use the resultObject ($result) to get the respective shapeObj ($shape)
$shape = $layer->getShape($result);
// get the bounds attribute
$rect = $shape->bounds;

[GIS] How to set attribute value of layer with PHP MapScript

Not sure about the old version of mapscript, the documentation is not available anymore. But for the latest version of PHP mapscript, the property of layer object is set via 'set' method.

int set(string property_name, new_value)
    Set object property to a new value.

So maybe you can try with:

$layer->set('opacity', 10);

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[GIS] PHP MapScript get feature / shape by index in layer

[GIS] How to set attribute value of layer with PHP MapScript

Related Question