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# MS RFC 16: MapScript WxS Services

Date

  2006/05/10

Author

  Frank Warmerdam

Contact

  warmerdam at pobox.com

Last Edited

  May 22, 2006

Status

  adopted and implemented

Version

  MapServer 4.10

## Purpose

The general intention is that a WMS or WCS service should be able to be setup via MapScript. The web request would be turned over to a MapScript script (Python, Perl, Java, etc) which can then manipulate the request and a map as needed. Then it can invoke the low level MapServer request function (ie. GetMap, GetCapabilities), and if desired manipulate the returned information before returning to the client. This will provide a means to do customizations such as:

- Implement security policy.

- Use dynamically created maps from a database, etc.

- Flesh out capabilities documents with auxiliary information not settable via the .map METADATA tags.

- Adjust error behaviors.

## Technical Solution

- GetCapabilities, GetFeatureInfo and GetMap calls for WMS callable from MapScript, and results capturable for processing.

- GetCapabilities, DescribeCoverage and GetCoverage calls for WCS callable from MapScript and results capturable for processing.

- GetCapabilities, DescribeFeatureType and GetFeature calls for WFS callable from MapScript and results capturable for processing.

- Any other OWS services dispatched through OWSDispatch (such as SOS) would also be accessible from MapScript.

- IO hooking to capture various output from MapServer services will be accomplished via mapio.c services, the same as is used to capture output for FastCGI services.

- All SWIG based MapScript languages will be supported (Perl, Python, Ruby, C#, Java). PHP (non SWIG) may be supported if the PHP MapScript maintainers do a similar implementation.

- A MapScript WxS HOWTO will be written, including simple examples of customized services.

## WxS Functions

Add the following methods on the mapObj in mapscript/swiginc/map.i.

    int OWSDispatch( OWSRequest *req );

We can’t call the lower level functions, like msWMSGetCapabilities() directly very easily because these functions require some pre-processing done by msWMSDispatch().

- Note that the OWSDispatch() reconfigures the map it is invoked on to match the request.

- Note that the results of the OWSRequest are still written out via the normal stdout stream handling, so separate msIO hooking is needed to capture the results.

## OWSRequest

This object is already defined to MapScript in mapscript/swiginc/owsrequest.i but it seems to lack a means of setting it from cgi arguments or directly by parsing a provided url. I propose to add the following method on the OWSRequest:

    loadParams();

- Loads the parameters from the normal sources (QUERY_STRING env. variable for instance).

    loadParams( const char * url );

- Loads the parameters from the given url portion as would have appeared in QUERY_STRING if REQUEST_METHOD was GET.

## IO Hooking

Currently output from functions such as msWMSGetCapabilities() is directed through the msIO services (in mapio.c), such as msIO_printf(). In order to capture this output and make it available for further processing it will be necessary to provide a means for MapScript applications to insert their own IO handlers of some sort.

Additionally, currently the msIO layer has a concept of io handlers, but they are global to the application. For non-trivial use of WxS MapScript services in Java, c# and other multithreaded environments it is desirable for it to be possible to insert per-thread IO handlers.

- Need to make at least current_stdin/stdout/stderr_context variables thread local. Possibly using the same approach as maperror.c. A new mutex will be required for this.

- Consider thread safe output to shared stdin/stdout/stderr handles for all threads? ie. protect with a mutex.

- We need to provide a convenent way to install “to buffer” and “from buffer” io handlers.

- We need to always use msIO redirection. Currently in the default case of not using FastCGI, USE_MAPIO is not defined in mapio.h and msIO_printf() and similar functions are actually just #define’ed to printf(). But if we want to be able to capture output all the time for MapScript, we will actually always need the msIO layer. So USE_MAPIO will always have to be defined.

    msIO_resetHandlers();

- Resets msIO handlers to defaults (using stdin, stdout, stderr).

- Clears buffer data if buffered handlers were installed.

    msIO_installStdoutToBuffer();

- Install handler to send stdout to a buffer, clear buffer.

    msIO_installStdinFromBuffer();

- Install handler to get stdin from a buffer, clear buffer.

    msIO_setStdinBuffer( unsigned char *data, int length );

- Set data for stdin buffer.

    gdBuffer msIO_getStdoutBufferBytes();

- Fetch stdout buffer pointer and length.

- gdBuffer already provides language specific bindings to get byte data.

    const char *msIO_getStdoutBufferString();

- Fetch stdout buffer as a string. Appropriate for XML and HTML results for instance.

The installed “buffer” handlers will manage their own buffer and concept of current read/write position.

My objective is that folks should be able to do something like this in Python MapScript.

    mapscript.msIO_installStdoutToBuffer()
    if map.OWSDispatch( req ) == mapscript.MS_SUCCESS:
      result = mapscript.msIO_getStdoutBufferString()
      mapscript.msIO_resetHandlers()

Questions:

1) Should we be “pushing” handlers instead of installing them and losing track of the previous handler? Then we could just pop them off.

2) Should we make the whole msIOContext thing more visible to MapScript? It seems like it would be complicated.

## gdBuffer

The msIO_getStdoutBufferBytes() returns a gdBuffer since most language bindings already have a way of using this as a “array of raw bytes” buffer. It is normally used for fetched gdImage buffers. But because the msIO function returns a gdBuffer referring to an internally memory array not “owned” by the gdBuffer we need to add a owns_data flag.

    typedef struct {
       unsigned char *data;
       int size;
       int owns_data;
    } gdBuffer;

Likewise, each of the language bindings needs to be modified to only call gdFree() on data if owns_data is true.

This:

    %typemap(out) gdBuffer {
       $result = PyString_FromStringAndSize($1.data, $1.size);
       gdFree($1.data);
    }

becomes this:

    %typemap(out) gdBuffer {
       $result = PyString_FromStringAndSize($1.data, $1.size);
       if( $1.owns_data )
           gdFree($1.data);
    }

And similarly for the other bindings.

## Files and objects affected

    mapio.c
    mapio.h
    mapscript/mapscript.i
    mapscript/swiginc/owsrequest.i
    mapscript/swiginc/image.i
    mapscript/swiginc/msio.i (new)
    mapscript/python/pymodule.i (gdBuffer)

## Backwards compatibility issues

There are no apparent backward compatibility problems with existing MapScript scripts.

## Implementation Issues

- the gdBuffer stuff likely ought to be generalized.

- some MapScript languages lack gdBuffer typemaps (ie. perl).

- some performance testing should be done to verify that USE_MAPIO isn’t going to slow down normal operations significantly. This is specially a concern once the mapio.c statics are actually handled as thread local as each msIO call will need to search for the appropriate thread local context.

- the msIO “buffer” approach is predicated on streaming output results into a memory buffer. For very large return results this may use an unreasonable amount of memory. For instance a WFS request with a 250MB response document. But such results aren’t necessarily reasonable in web services context anyways.

- The set of functions will need to be exposed separately in the PHP bindings.

## Test suite

The msautotest/mspython and python unit tests will be extended with at least rudimentary testing of a few of these services.

As we have no automated tests for other MapScript languages, no automated tests will be added, but I will endeavour to prepare simple scripts to test things. Currently this has been done for Python and Perl MapScript.

## Example

This shows a very simple Python MapScript script that invokes a passed in OWSRequest passed via normal cgi means, but adding a text/plain content type ahead of the regular content type so we can see the results. The script could easily have done extra manipulation on the URL parameters, and on the map object.

Example:

    #!/usr/bin/env python

    import sys
    import mapscript

    req = mapscript.OWSRequest()
    req.loadParams()

    mapscript.msIO_installStdoutToBuffer()

    map.OWSDispatch( req )

    print 'Content-type: text/plain'
    print
    print mapscript.msIO_getStdoutBufferString()

## Bug ID

https://github.com/mapserver/mapserver/issues/1788

## Voting history

+1: FrankW, SteveW.

## Open questions

None