Thursday 6 September 2012

Thought about OGC WFS-T -- Enforce Business Rules in Geospatial Edition

The problem is common; allow users to create, modify and delete features. Great, lets use WFS-T, what a nice fit! But...

Example use case:

The user creates a new address (point) on the map. He selects the address position and then has to fill other attributes. Civic number, Street Name, Postal Code, City, Country.

So the user already selected the x,y location for the feature, why should he have to fill the street name, the postal code, the city, the country?

Here is why, It is not possible to enforce any kind of business rules based on the position of the feature we are editing; or based on any other attribute. The describe feature type request should have an optional feature parameter.

Example of a describefeaturetype request:
http:///?request=describefeaturetype&service=wfs&version=1.1.1&outputformat=xmlschema

The solution? In a perfect world, WFS-T should take this use case in consideration for its next revision, so that open source or vendor implementations resolve the issue.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think about it.

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