Currently I have an openlayers web page which querys a tilelite server serving up mapnik tiles with various shapefiles (rivers, lakes, fire boundaries, time zones, nat forests, BLM land, tv reception contours …) added through layers-shapefiles.xml.inc.
Soon I will be traveling extensively around the western US. I’m looking for a system that can generate tiles locally so I don’t use up my data usage (my current setup works well for this), but has a little more capability when it comes to querying shapefile data. My current setup is pretty limited when it comes to this. I can turn on and off shapes and names depending on the zoom level but I’m looking for something that might let me query individual shapes and present the cooresponding data (from the shapefile db) in say a popup window or slide out frame. I’m OK with constructing the popup or slideout frame if needed.
I’m thinking of installing mapserver and seeing what it can do, and I will probably do that today, but I just thought I would ask if anyone might help steer me toward a tool with the capabilities I’m looking for.
Update:
I’ve taken a day to familiarize myself with mapserver. I can turn on and off layers, which I couldn’t do with mapnik tiles served up by tilelite and screened by openlayers. However, I couldn’t find any examples of people doing what I previously described which was querying an individual shape and getting the attributes for that shape from the shapefile attribute table and presenting it somehow on the web page via balloon, popout… Is what I’m asking possible yet?
Thats possibl. Check here
http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/getfeatureinfo-control.html
http://demo.mapserver.org/tutorial/section3.html