MapServer 4.4 Revision History

Quick summary of what's new in version 4.4:

• Added WCS support (server only)
• Added support for Time dimension in WMS
• Lots of fixes/improvements to the OGC WMS and WFS interfaces (too many to list here). MapServer 4.4 passes all the tests of the OGC WMS 1.1.1 test suite and is ready to be certified (Formal "WMS Compliance" certification with OGC is in the works).
• Added FastCGI support
• Lots of fixes to allow running in long-lived processes and multithreaded environments (memory leaks, mutex locking, etc.).
• Added connection pooling (implemented for SDE, PostGIS and Oracle Spatial).
• Lots of improvements to SWIG MapScript API and docs.
• Support for i18n encodings in map labels. Tested with Chinese, Japanese and Thai.
• Added ability to produce rotated maps (i.e. North is not at the top)
• Completion of SDE versioned query support

... and many many more fixes and enhancements. See the HISTORY.TXT that comes with the source package for the complete list (relevant parts as of version 4.4.0 included below).

Detailed change log since version 4.2 (from HISTORY.TXT)

Version 4.4.0 (2004-11-29)
--------------------------

- Fixed WMS GetCapabilities 1.1.0 crash when wms_style_<...>_legendurl_*
  metadata were used (bug 1096)

- WCS GetCapabilities : Added ResponsibleParty support.

- WMS GetCapabilities : Service online resource was not url encoded (bug 1093)
 
- Fixed php mapscript problem with wfs_filter selection : Bug 1092.

- Fixed encoding problem with WFS server when wfs_service_onlineresource 
  was not explicitly specified (bug 1082)

- Add trailing "?" or "&" to connection string when required in WFS
  client layers using GET method (bug 1082)

- Fixed : SLD rasters was failing when there was Spatial Filter (Bug 1087) 

- Fixed mapwfslayer.c build error when WFS was not enabled (bug 1083)

- Check that we have vsnprintf in mapimagemap.c before using it. 


Version 4.4.0-beta3 (2004-11-22)
--------------------------------

- Added tests to mimimize the threat of recursion problems when evaluating
  LAYER REQUIRES or LABELREQUIRES expressions. Note that via MapScript it
  is possible to circumvent that test by defining layers with problems 
  after running prepareImage. Other things crop up in that case too (symbol 
  scaling dies) so it should be considered bad programming practice
  (bug 1059).

- Added --with-sderaster configure option. 

- Make sure that msDrawWMSLayerLow calls msDrawLayer instead of 
  msDrawRasterLayerLow directly ensuring that some logic (transparency) that 
  are in msDrawLayer are applied (bug 541).

- Force GD/JPEG outputFormatObjects to IMAGEMODE RGB and TRANSPARENT OFF
  if they are RGBA or ON.  Makes user error such as in bug 1703 less likely.

- Advertize only gd and gdal formats for wms capabilities (bug 455).

- Pass config option GML_FIELDTYPES=ALWAYS_STRING to OGR so that all GML
  attributes are returned as strings to MapServer. This is most efficient
  and prevents problems with autodetection of some attribute types (bug 1043).
  
- msOGCWKT2ProjectionObj() now uses the OGRSpatialReference::SetFromUserInput()
  method.  This allows various convenient setting options, including the 
  ability to handle ESRI WKT by prefixing the WKT string with "ESRI::". 

- Fixed GetLegendGraphic in WMS Capabilities that were missing the '?'
  or '&' separator if it was not included in wms_onlineresource (bug 1065).

- Updated WMS/WFS client and server code to lookup "ows_*" metadata names
  in addition to the default "wms_*" (or "wfs_*") metadatas (WCS was already
  implemented this way). This reduces the amount of duplication in mapfiles
  that support multiple OGC interfaces since "ows_*" metadata can be used
  almost everywhere for common metadata items shared by multiple OGC
  interfaces (bug 568).

- Added ows_service_onlineresource metadata for WMS/WFS to distinguish
  between service and GetMap/Capabilities onlineresources (bug 375).

- Added map->setSize() to PHP MapScript (bug 1066).

- Re-enabled building PHP MapScript using PHP's bundled regex/*.o. This is
  needed to build in an environment with PHP configured as an Apache DSO
  (bugs 990, 520).

- Fixed problem with raster dither support on windows (related to ascii 
  encoding pointers) (bug 722).

- Moved PHP/SWIG MapScript layer->getExtent() logic down to msLayerGetExtent()
  to avoid code duplication (bug 1051).

- Added SDE Raster drawing support (experimental).

- HTML legends: Added [leg_header_html] and [leg_footer_html] (bug 1032).

- Added "z" support in SWIG MapScript for pointObj (bug 871).

- In PHP Mpascript when using  ms_newrectobj, the members minx, miny,
  maxx, maxy are initialized to -1 (bug 788).

- Write out proper world file with remote WMS result, it was off by half
  a pixel (bug 1050).

- Send a warning in the wms capabilities if the layer status is set 
  to default (bug 638).

- Fixed PHP MapScript compile warnings: dereferencing type-punned pointer
  will break strict-aliasing rules (bug 1053).

- Added $layer->isVisible() to PHP MapScript (bug 539).

- Ported $layer->getExtent() to PHP MapScript (bug 826).

- wms_group_abstract can now be used in the capabilities (bug 754).

- If wms_stylelist is an empty string, do not output the  tag
  for MapContexts (bug 595).

- Avoid passing FILE* to GD library by utilizing GD's gdIOCtx interface
  (bug 1047).
  
- Output warning in wms/wfs capabilities document if layer,group,map names have
  space in them (bug 486, bug 646).

- maporaclespatial.c: fixed declarations problems (bug 1044).

- Allow use of msOWSPrintURLType with no metadata. In this case the default 
  parameters will be used (bug 1001).

- Ensure the outputFormatObj attached to msImageLoadGDStream() results reflect
  the interlacedness of the loaded image.  Also ensure that the RGB PNG
  reference images work (make imagemode match gdImg) (bug 1039).

- Fixed support for non-square pixels in WCS (bug 1014).

- Expose only GD formats for GetLegendGraphic in the capabilities (bug 1001).

- Check for supported formats when process a GetLegendGraphic request 
  (bug 1030).

- mapraster.c: fixed problem with leaks in tileindexed case where the
  tile index is missing (bug 713).

- Oracle Spatial: implemented connection pool support for Oracle Spatial. 
  New layer data parameters to support query functions, added 
  "using unique ".  Added "FILTER", "RELATE" and "GEOMRELATE" 
  parameters, now permit users to choose the Oracle Spatial Filter. Modified 
  the internal SQL to always apply FILTER function. And improve the Oracle 
  Spatial performance.

- Centralize "stdout binary mode setting" for win32 in msIO_needBinaryStdout().
  Use it when writing GDAL files to stdout in mapgdal.c.  Fixes problems with
  output of binary files from GDAL outputformat drivers on win32 via WMS/WCS.

- MapServer now provides one default style named (default), title and 
  LegendURL when generating capabilities.  Added also the possibility to use
  the keyword default for STYLES parameter when doing a GetMap 
  (..&STYLES=default,defeault,...) (bug 1001).

- Add xlink:type="simple" in WMS MetadataURL (bug 1027).


Version 4.4.0-beta2 (2004-11-03)
--------------------------------

- free mapServObj properly in mapserv.c in OWS dispatch case to fix minor
  memory leaks.

- modified msCloseConnections() to also close raster layers so that 
  held raster query results will be freed. 

- modified raster queries to properly set the classindex in the resultcache.

- modified msDrawQueryCache() to be very careful to not try and lookup 
  information on out-of-range classindex values.  This seems to occur when
  default shapes come back witha classindex of 0 even if there are no classes.
  (ie. raster query results). 

- the loadmapcontext function has changed it behaviour.  Before the 4.4 relase
  when loading layers from a map context, the layer name was built using
  a unique prefix + the name found in the context (eg for the 2nd layer in 
  map context named park, the layer name generated would possibly be l:2:park).
  Now the loadmapcontext takes a 2nd optional argument to force the creation
  of the unique names. The default behaviour is now to have the layer name
  equals to the name found in the context file (bug 1023).   

- Fixed problem with WMS GetCapabilities aborting when wms_layer_group is
  used for some layers but not for all (bug 1024).

- Changed raster queries to return the list of all pixel values as an 
  attribute named "value_list" rather than "values" to avoid conflict with
  special [values] substitution rule in maptemplate.c.

- Fixed raster queries to reproject results back to map projection, and to
  do point queries distance checking against the correct projection (bug 1021).

- Get rid of WMS 1.0.8 support. It's not an officially supported verison
  of the spec anyway: it's synonymous for 1.1.0 (bug 1022).

- Allow use of '=' inside HTML template tag parser (bug 978).

- Use metadata ows_schema_location for WMS/WFS/WCS/SLD (bugs 999, 1013, 938).
  The default value if metadata is not found is 
  http://schemas.opengeospatial.net.
 
- Generate a RULE  tag when generating an SLD (bug 1010).

- WMS GetLegendGraphic uses now the RULE value to return an icon for
  a class that has the same name as the RULE value (bug 843).
 
- Add msOWSPrintURLType: This funciton is a generic URL printing fuction for 
  OGC specification metadata (WMS, WFS, WCS, WMC, etc.) (bug 944).

- Support MetadataURL, DataURL and LegendURL tags in WMS capabilities 
  document and MetadataURL in WFS capabilities.

- SWIG mapscript: clone methods for layerObj, classObj, styleObj (bug 1012).

- Implemented an intarray helper class for SWIG mapscript which allows for
  multi-language manipulation of layer drawing order (bugs 853, 1005).

- Fixed WMS GetLegendGraphic which was returning an exception (GD error)
  when requested layer was out of scale (bug 1006).

- Fixed maplexer.l to work with flex 2.5.31 (bug 975).

- WMS GetMap requests now have MS_NONSQUARE enabled by default. This means
  that if the width/height ratio doesn't match the extent's x/y ratio then
  the map is stretched as stated in the WMS specification (bug 862).

- In WMS, layers with no explicit projection defined will receive a copy
  of the map's projectionObj if a new SRS is specified in the GetMap request
  or if MS_NONSQUARE is enabled. This will prevent the problem with layers 
  that don't show up in WMS request when the server administrator forgets
  to explicitly set projections on all the layers in a WMS mapfile (bug 947).

- Implemented FastCGI cleanup support for win32 and unix in mapserv.c.

- Solved configure/compile issues with libiconv (bugs 909, 1017).


Version 4.4.0-beta1 (2004-10-21)
--------------------------------

- "shared" compilation target now supports some kind of versioning,
  should at least prevent libmap.so version collisions when upgrading
  MapServer on a server (bug 982).

- When no RULE parameter has been specified in the WMS request
  a legend should be returned with all classes for the specified LAYER.
  Changes has been made in mapwms.c (bug 653). Also if the SCALE parameter
  is provided in the WMS request is will be used to determine whether
  the legend of the specified layer should be drawn in the case that the
  layer is scale dependant (big 809).

- Nested layers in the capabilities are supported by using a new metadata
  tag WMS_LAYER_GROUP (bug 776).
  
- Added greyscale+alpha render support if mapdrawgdal.c (bug 965). 

- Added --with-fastcgi support to configure.

- support OGC mapcontext through mapserver cgi (bug 946).

- support for reading 3d shape file (z) (bug 869).

- add php mapscript functions to expose the z element (bug 870).

- imageObj::write() method for SWIG mapscript (bug 941).

- Protect users from 3 potential sources of threading problems: parsing
  expression strings outside of msLoadMap, evaluating mapserver logical
  expressions, and loading symbol set files outside of msLoadMap (bug 339).

- Various fixes allowing unit tests to run leak free under valgrind on 
  i686.  Memory is now properly freed when exiting from common error
  states (bug 927).

- Restored ability to render transparent (indexed or alpha) pixmap symbols
  on RGB map images, including annotation layers and embedded scalebars.
  This feature remains OFF by default for map layers and is enabled by
  specifying TRANSPARENCY ALPHA (bugs 926, 490).

- mapserv_fcgi.c removed.  Committed new comprehensive FastCGI support. 

- New mapserver exceptions for Java mapscript thanks to Umberto Nicoletti
  (bug 895).

- Removed mapindex.c, mapindex.h, shpindex.c components of old unused 
  shapefile indexing method.  

- Use the symbol size instead of 1 for the default style size value. This is
  done by setting the default size to -1 and adding msSymbolGetDefaultSize() 
  everywhere to get the default symbolsize (Bug 751).

- Correct Bug with GML BBOX output when using a  with a 
  GetFeature request (Bug 913).

- Encode all metadatas and mapfile parameters outputed in a xml document
  (Bug 802).

- Implement the ENCODING label parameter to support internationalization.
  Note this require the iconv library (Bug 858).

- New and improved Java mapscript build provided by unicoletti@prometeo.it
  and examples by Y.K. Choo (bug 876).

- MapContext: Cleanup code to make future integration more easily and output 
  SRS and DataURL in the order required by the spec.

- Fixed issue with polygon outline colors and brush caching (bug 868).

- New C# mapscript makefiles and examples provided by Y.K. Choo
   committed under mapscript/csharp/ (bug 867).
  
- Renamed 'string' member of labelCacheMemberObj to 'text' to avoid
  conflicts in SWIG mapscript with C# and Java types (bug 852).
  
- Fixed Bug 866 : problem when generating an sld on a pplygon layer

- SWIG mapscript: map's output image width and height should be set 
  simultaneously using new mapObj::setSize() method.  This performs
  necessary map geotransform computation.  Direct setting of map width
  and height is deprecated (bug 836).

- Fixed bug 832 (validate srs value) : When the SRS parameter in a GetMap 
  request contains a SRS that is valid for some, but not all of the layers 
  being requested, then the server shall throw a Service Exception 
  (code = "InvalidSRS"). Before this fix, mapserver use to reproject
  the layers to the requested SRS. 

- Fixed bug 834: SE_ROW_ID in SDE not initialized for unregistered SDE tables

- Fixed bug 823 : adding a validation of the SRS parameter when doing
  a GetMap request on a wms server. Here is the OGC statement :
  'When the SRS parameter in a GetMap request contains a SRS 
  that is valid for some, but not all of the layers being requested, 
  then the server shall throw a Service Exception (code = "InvalidSRS").'

- Set the background color of polygons or circles when using transparent
  PIXMAP symbol.

- SWIG mapscript class extensions are completely moved from mapscript.i
  into separate interface files under mapscript/swiginc.

- Overhaul of mapscript unit testing framework with a comprehensive test
  runner mapscript/python/tests/runtests.py.

- Modified the MS_VALID_EXTENT macro to take an extent as its argument 
  instead of the quartet of members. MapServer now checks that extents input 
  through the mapfile are valid in mapfile.c (web, map, reference, 
  and layer).  Modified msMapSetExtent in mapobject.c to use the new 
  macro instead of its home-grown version. Modified all cases that used 
  MS_VALID_EXTENT to the new use case.
  
- Layers now accept an EXTENT through the mapfile (bug 786). Nothing 
  is done with it at this point, and getExtent still queries the 
  datasource rather than getting information from the mapfile-specified 
  extent.

- Fixed problem with WMS GetFeatureInfo when map was reprojected. Was a
  problem with msProjectRect and zero-size search rectangles (bug 794)

- MapServer version now output to mapscriptvars and read by Perl Makefile.PL
  and Python setup.py (bug 795).

- Map.web, layer, and class metadata are exposed in SWIG mapscript as
  first-class objects (bug 737).

- Add support for spatial filters in the SLD (Bug 782)

- A few fixes to allow php_mapscript to work with both PHP4 and PHP5.
  PHP5 support should still be considered experimental. (bug 718)

- Fixed SDE only recognizing SE_ROW_ID as the unique column (bug 536). 
  The code now autosenses the unique row id column.

- Enhanced SDE support to include support for queries against 
  user-specified versions.  The version name can be specified as the 
  last parameter of the CONNECTION string.

- Fixed automated generation of onlineresource in OWS GetCapabilities
  when the xxx_onlineresource metadata is not specified: the map= parameter
  used to be omitted and is now included in the default onlineresource if
  it was explicitly set in QUERY_STRING (bug 643)

- Fixed possible crash when producing WMS errors INIMAGE (bug 644)

- Fixed automated generation of onlineresource in OWS GetCapabilities
  when the xxx_onlineresource metadata is not specified: the map= parameter
  used to be omitted and is now included in the default onlineresource if
  it was explicitly set in QUERY_STRING (bug 643)

- Fixed an issue with annotation label overlap. There was an issue with
  the way msRectToPolygon was computing it's bounding box. (bug 618)

- Removed "xbasewohoo" debug output when using JOINs and fixed a few 
  error messages related to MySQL joins (bug 652)

- Fixed "raster cracking" problem (bug 493)

- Improvements to Makefile.vc, and nmake.opt so that a mapscriptvars file
  can be produced on windows.  

- Updated setup.py so Python MapScript builds on win32. 

- Added preliminary raster query support.

- No more Python-stopping but otherwise benign errors raised from
  msDrawWMSLayer() (bug 650).

- Finished prototyping all MapServer functions used by SWIG-Mapscript
  and added 'void' to prototypes of no-arg functions, eliminating all
  but two SWIG-Mapscript build warnings (bug 658).

- Mapscript: resolved issue with pens and dynamic drawing of points (bug 663).

- Mapscript: fixes to tests of shape copying and new image symbols.

- Mapscript: new OWSRequest class based on cgiRequestObj structure in 
  cgiutil.h is a first step to allow programming with MapServer's OWS
  dispatching (bug 670).

- Mapscript: styles member of classObj structure is no longer exposed to
  SWIG (bug 611).

- Implementation geotransform/rotation support in cgi core, and mapscript.i.

- Testing: fixed syntax error, 'EPSG' -> 'epsg' in test.map (bug 687).
  Added an embedded scalebar which demonstrates that bug 519 is fixed.
  The test data package is also made more complete by including two fonts
  from Bitstream's open Vera fonts (bug 694).

- Mapscript (SWIG): remove promote and demote methods from layerObj.  Use
  of container's moveLayerUp/moveLayerDown is better, and this brings
  the module nearer to PHP-Mapscript (bug 692).

- mapogr.cpp: Now echos CPLGetLastErrorMsg() results if OGR open fails. 

- mapraster.c: fixed tile index corruption problem (bug 698)

- Mladen Turk's map copying macros in mapcopy.h clean up map cloning and
  allow for copying of fontset and symbolset.  Added cloning tests in
  python/tests/testCloneMap.py and refactored testing suite (bugs 640 & 701).

- Mapscript: removing obsolete python/setup_wnone.py file.

- CONFIG MS_NONSQUARE YES now enables non-square pixel mode (mostly for WMS). 
  Changes in mapdraw.c (msDrawMap()) to use the geotransform "hack" to allow
  non-square pixels.

- When using the text/html mime type in a GetFeature request, if the
  layer's template is not set to a valid file, errors occur.
  Correction is : the text/html is not advertized by default and 
  will only be advertized if the user has defined 
  "WMS_FEATURE_INFO_MIME_TYPE"  "text/html" (bug 736)

- Make PHP MapScript's layer->open() produce a PHP Warning instead of a
  Fatal error (bug 742)

- MapServer hash tables are now a structure containing a items pointer
  to hashObj. See maphash.h for new prototypes of hash table functions.
  In SWIG mapscript, Map, Layer, and Class metadata are now instances of the
  new hashTableObj class.  fontset.fonts and Map.configoptions are also
  instances of hashTableObj.  The older getMetaData/setMetaData and
  metadata iterator methods can be deprecated (bug 737).
  
- Mapscript-SWIG: made the arguments of mapObj and layerObj constructors
  optional.  A layerObj can now exist outside of a map and can be added
  to a mapObj using the insertLayer method.  mapObj.removeLayer now 
  returns a copy of the removed Layer rather than an integer (bug 759).

- Fixed $map->processTemplate() which was always returning NULL.
  Bug introduced in version 4.0 in all flavours of MapScript (bug 410)

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