WMS Servers

Owned by Robert Sikorski
Last updated: 15 Feb 2022 by Wojciech Mozolewski
3 min read

In order to enable hosting of your data, you have to go to Administration tab and click WMS Servers button.

You will see WMS manager where all the servers are listed. If you want to create a new one, just click Add. Once added servers can be also easily edited or deleted.

To create a working WMS server, you need to set all the parameters:

  1. Name – is an unique ID for your WMS server. You will need it in URLs provided to WMS clients.

    Shared data will be available under “http://[domain_or_IP_address]/[environment_name]/WMS.svc/[Name]”

    In our case it will be: “http://localhost/map/WMS.svc/TestWMSServer”

  2. Map – is the map that contains the data for sharing. Once the map is selected, its layers will be loaded. Map Title and Description are being returned by the server as a metadata, so they can be set at discretion.
  3. User – any user account name without a password (it must have at least Allow read permission set for the shared layers).

  4. Layers – contains the list of all the layers from the selected map. A layer that is shared must have its Tag set. Note that you can share Group Layers and only this layer must have a tag (children layers not).

    To set a layer Tag, open Layer Properties and write your tag.

Important:

All the layers that are shared and hidden in map in the same time (in Earthlight), won’t be visible in WMS client. In other words you will be able to add a hidden layer, but it won’t show until the layer becomes visible in Earthlight.
To change a layer visibility, you have to do the following:

Open your map in Earthlight.

Find desired layer in the layers panel on the left and change its Properties.

In General tab check the Visible box and press Apply.

 Creating an inspect MWS URL

To create an inspectable WMS you can use an abbreviated form ignoring the WMT fields if inspect parameter is in the URL.

The minimum syntax is:

http://localhost/wms.svc/test?inspect=layerTagName:fieldName:fieldValue


Calling such URL will execute the following actions in order:

1) WMS will try to locale layer with a given layerTagName and find a record that contains fieldValue in a column fieldName.
2) It will then apply inspection style to this record in accordance with the Inspection Styles of Global User Settings
3) Center viewport to include the whole geometry,
4) Apply 10% viewport margin
5) Jump to the next higher scale step (1024, 2048, etc.).
6) If the inspected record is the point, it will limit the scale to 1024.

Additional, optional parameters:
margin = default 10, buffer for viewport in %
min_scale = default 1024, minimum scale to be used for viewport, useful for points
force_scale = default "no", prevent adjusting the scale to the nearest i.e. 1024, 2048 etc.

Moreover, you can still use all standard WMS parameters, like width and height (if not provided, we default to 640x480 pixels), transparency, DPI, etc.