Feature Paging
As a follow up to sgillies’ post on Feature Paging, I’d just like to say that I was thinking of this a couple days ago for FeatureServer, and implemented it last night for the datasources that FeatureServer provides for which it makes sense. (The WFS DataSource is one of the ones that doesn’t.) The implementation is pretty immature — for everything other than postgis, it’s just a ‘skip’ counter, but it’s there.
(Note that I did this before I even saw posts about it — I think this is just more evidence that all the things we’re talking about here are well understood and not novel, though it is interesting that we’re all implementing them at the same time.)
So now you can do:
FeatureServer/layername/all.georss?bbox=-180,-90,0,0&startfeature=10&maxfeatures=10
And on a PostGIS layer, it will translate into a LIMIT, OFFSET block, and in a DBM layer, it will just iterate and not do anything, and in OGR, it will iterate and skip over the values that it doesn’t care about.
I think that’s cool, anyway.