[MS4W-Users] Organizing and Using Global Connections in MAP Files

[Brent Fraser]

Hi Andrew,

Typically I solve this kind of problem using the "INCLUDE" statement in a .map file:

MAP
STATUS ON
LAYER
NAME 'Test'
TYPE " POLYGON
INCLUDE '../../db_connect.map'
DATA 'the_geom from things using unique gid using SRID=4269'
:

where the db_connect.map would contain things like:

CONNECTIONTYPE POSTGIS
CONNECTION "host=192.168.0.27 dbname=map user=map password=map port=5433"
PROCESSING "CLOSE_CONNECTION=DEFER"

Best Regards,
Brent Fraser
GeoAnalytic Inc

----------------------------------------
From: "Andrew Tegenkamp via MS4W-Users" <ms4w-users at lists.ms4w.com>
Sent: 3/4/22 8:16 AM
To: ms4w-users at lists.ms4w.com
Cc: Andrew Tegenkamp <ategenkamp at interactivegis.com>
Subject: [MS4W-Users] Organizing and Using Global Connections in MAP Files

We have MS4W 4.0.5 and are using PostGIS that interacts with a PHP web application.

We're using standard Mapfiles and MapScript, and I have the "CONNECTIONTYPE postgis" and "CONNECTION "host=..." lines in a bunch of map files and am working to clean up and consolidate my code at the moment.

I'd like to find a way to make that a global variable so it's easier to update and change. For convenience I'd prefer to store some of the MAP files inside the web root but don't want to expose the database connection so I'm keeping it outside the web root for now.

My first thought was to set a .htaccess file to process .map files like .php and add my own PHP, but of course the mapfile location is a local file c:\ms4w\ so it does not process any PHP in a MAP file and tells me "First token must be MAP, this doesn't look like a mapfile" which makes sense.

Does anyone have a good strategy for organizing multiple Mapfiles and making a more global CONNECTION line that I'm missing?

None of this is a requirement and I can do global find and replace operations, but it seemed there may be a better way, so I wanted to reach out and see if anyone had a better way than I did!

Thanks,
Andrew
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