Rasters and Tile Indexing

When handling very large raster layers it is often convenient, and higher performance to split the raster image into a number of smaller images. Each file is a tile of the larger raster mosaic available for display. The list of files forming a layer can be stored in a shapefile with polygons representing the footprint of each file, and the name of the files. This is called a TILEINDEX and works similarly to the same feature in vector layers. The result can be represented in the MAP file as one layer, but MapServer will first scan the tile index, and ensure that only raster files overlapping the current display request will be opened.

The following example shows a simple example. No DATA statement is required because MapServer will fetch the filename of the raster files from the Location attribute column in the hp2.dbf file for records associated with polygons in hp2.shp that intersect the current display region. The polygons in hp2.shp should be rectangles representing the footprint of the corresponding file. Note that the files do not have to be all the same size, the formats can vary and they can even overlap (later files will be drawn over earlier ones); however, they must all be in the same coordinate system (projection) as the layer.

LAYER
  NAME "hpool"
  STATUS ON
  TILEINDEX "hp2.shp"
  TILEITEM "Location"
  TYPE RASTER
END

The filenames in the tileindex are searched for relative to the SHAPEPATH or map file, not relative to the tileindex. Great care should be taken when establishing the paths put into the tileindex to ensure they will evaluate properly in use. Often it is easiest to place the tileindex in the SHAPEPATH directory, and to create the tileindex with a path relative to the SHAPEPATH directory. When all else fails, absolute paths can be used in tileindex, but then they cannot be so easily moved from system to system.

While there are many ways to produce TILEINDEX shapefiles for use with this command, one option is the gdaltindex program, part of the GDAL utility suite. The gdaltindex program will automatically generate a tile index shapefile from a list of GDAL supported raster files passed on the command line.

Usage: gdaltindex [-tileindex field_name] index_file [gdal_file]*

% gdaltindex doq_index.shp doq/*.tif

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