PostGIS support

PostGIS/PostgreSQL Database

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PostGIS is Refraction Research's spatial extension to the PostgreSQL enterprise database.

PostGIS is supported directly by MapServer and must be compiled into MapServer to work.

In most cases, PostgreSQL and PostGIS libraries (.dll or .so) must be present in the system's path environment for functionality to be present. This includes the libpq and libpostgis libraries.

Map file example

• Specify CONNECTIONTYPE POSTGIS.

• Define CONNECTION as:

       "host=yourhostname dbname=yourdatabasename user=yourdbusername     password=yourdbpassword port=yourpgport" 

  
  

• CONNECTION parameters can be in any order. Most are optional. dbname is required. host defaults to localhost, port defaults to 5432--the standard port for PostgreSQL.

• Define DATA as: "geometrycolumn from yourtablename". MapServer had a bug related to the keyword from. Specify it in lowercase to avoid problems. geometrycolumn can be the_geom if the shp2pgsql utility is used to load data, or wkb_geometry if ogr2ogr is used.

For example:

       LAYER         NAME pg_test         TYPE POLYGON         CONNECTIONTYPE POSTGIS         CONNECTION "host=mapserver.com dbname=gmap user=julio"         DATA "wkb_geometry FROM province"         CLASS            ...         END       END 

For more info about PostGIS and MapServer, see PostGIS docs at http://postgis.refractions.net/docs/.