Brent, Since your countries shapefile likely won't change very often, I would go with your fallback solution.
It is always faster to pre-class your data. David. -----Original Message----- From: UMN MapServer Users List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Brent Pedersen Sent: Friday, April 21, 2006 11:41 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] randomly assigned COLOR 's? hi, with a map of the world with country boundaries and using only the mapserver CGI, is it possible to have the countries filled with one of ~5 different colors. either at random or uniformly. is there a way to do this in the mapfile without relying on attributes in the shapefile? my fallback solution will be to add a column in the .shp and assign number 1 - 5 to each country and use that in a map file EXPRESSION. i thought maybe there was another means i was missing. something like an automatic alternating color scheme... to help me do less work. thanks, -brent
