On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 7:00 AM, Rob Atkinson <robatkinson...@gmail.com> wrote:
> App-schema allows clients to use style sheets to deal with responses.
> (Because its a known schema, a stylesheet can be published and used to
> render it. I have build clients with catalogues of stylesheets for
> each feature type - and no way would it be worth bother with ad-hoc
> flat schemas).  We build an entire enterprise content magement,
> project tracking and time-sheeting system using WFS, and also Local
> government facilities booking systems based on this,
> off-theshelf-desktop GIS is the niche market here, compared to
> business Web applications.
>
> general purpose GIS clients arent particulary useful getFeatureInfo
> endpoints anyway - enableing actual applications to be built with the
> services is a higher priority.

I disagree. GeoServer is for today production systems, R&D is important
for the future but should never be allowed to break production readiness
in common situations (app schema and complex features are good,
but they should not break our existing simple feature user base).
Before going on with such changes I suggest, as I already did in my
previous mail, to do a reality check and see what other server do
and what clients can accept, and come out with a solution that
does not make GeoServer an oddball existing systems cannot talk to.

> if the describeFeaturetype response delivers a gml 3 schema,
> getFeatureInfo should respect that for the same feature types -
> otherwise how will a client ever know what to trust?

I think there is confusion here. GetFeatureInfo is for WMS, which
is a different service than WFS: one cannot simply go and assume
what is published by WFS has any influence over the WMS outputs.
The only link between the two, spec wise, is provided by the SLD
spec, which has the DescribeLayer call which in turn links
back to DescribeFeatureType (a WFS 1.0 one, btw).
However that is meant for clients
that need to build their own SLD, I don't recall ever seeing any
indication of a link between that and the GetFeatureInfo output.

Moreover, if you look at the WMS 1.3 spec you'll see that there
is no mention anymore of the output format that GetFeatureInfo
is supposed to support.

It would be easier, imho, to have some conventional name that
returns the gml in the app-schema form, and leave the WMS 1.1
suggested mime type be, possibly by returning some flattened
form of the complex feature, or nothing at all.

Cheers
Andrea

-----------------------------------------------------
Ing. Andrea Aime
Senior Software Engineer

GeoSolutions S.A.S.
Via Poggio alle Viti 1187
55054  Massarosa (LU)
Italy

phone: +39 0584962313
fax:     +39 0584962313

http://www.geo-solutions.it
http://geo-solutions.blogspot.com/
http://www.linkedin.com/in/andreaaime
http://twitter.com/geowolf

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