Here it is my opinion about WMS access control (not only QGIS Mapserver). This is mainly to Giovanni Manghi, which has to solve the problem: I think you can choose between solution #1 (short term) and solution #3 (mid term).
Three different approaches: 1) Authentication and redirect by the web server: users with different privileges will be redirected to different backends (different QGIS projects, in QGIS Mapserver case). All the work is to make different projects with different views of the data. 2) QGIS Mapserver will implement some sort of Access Control: it will give diffferent results for the same project/query, based on the authenticated user. This seems simple, but an alarm bell is that no WMS server exists which do that (except for Geoserver, but I did not investigated how). This approach is hard: whe have a standard protocol (WMS) and we want to add some out-of-standard features (Access Control). As far as I understand UMN-MapServer developers have avoided this at all, will QGIS Mapserver developers endorse it instead? Is not so simple even to define what is access control: layer access? Attribute access? Vector? Raster? Read/Write? All of this will be buried intimately into the WMS code: I don't like it very much. 3) A "proxy" approach can leave the WMS code intact: an http proxy will receive the query, parses it, apply Access Control and pass the (eventually modified) query to the WMS. The response will be eventually modified (e.g. stripping data from the XML GetCapabilities response) and passes it to the client. The granularity of the Access Control will be very rude, because the WMS protocol has a rude query syntax (layer on/off, not much more), but proxying is the only "right" way to filter a protocol without rewriting it. All the software cited by Pirim uses the third approach, as far I can understand. -- Niccolo Rigacci Firenze - Italy Tel. ufficio: 055-0118525 _______________________________________________ Qgis-developer mailing list Qgis-developer@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer