Pitney Bowes MapInfo Professional - Manual (Page 416)

necessary information cannot be found. In other cases, MapInfo Professional may miss functionality
that the server is trying to provide, such as filters.
• Support HTTP GET and/or HTTP Post for the DescribeFeatureType and GetFeature requests.
The MapInfo Professional client supports both HTTP GET and HTTP POST. The server should advertise
what it accepts for each request in its GetCapabilities response. MapInfo Professional prefers HTTP
POST for both operations, so if the server advertises that it supports both HTTP POST and HTTP
GET methods for these operations, MapInfo Professional uses HTTP POST.
• Supply the URL for both the DescribeFeatureType and GetFeature in their GetCapabilities
response. The URL provided must be valid for that request. If the server provides an invalid URL,
MapInfo Professional's WFS client cannot work and displays a suitable error message.
The DescribeFeatureType response should be:
• An XML Schema that contains the information for the table specified only. If the server returns
a schema that contains descriptions for multiple tables, MapInfo Professional cannot parse it correctly,
and the operation will fail.
• A Valid XML Schema. If not, no further operations can be allowed for that feature type. Without a
valid schema, MapInfo Professional cannot create or populate the table. In this case you can either
select another table, select another server, or cancel the WFS dialog box.
MapInfo Professional may not handle schemas that are "well formed" but contain invalid XML. Note:
MapInfo Professional checks that the schema returned for DescribeFeatureType is well formed XML,
but does not validate the XML. Our WFS client works correctly with many servers that return schema's
which contain invalid items, and our developers thought that eliminating these servers because they did
not contain 100% valid XML was too limiting.
MapInfo Professional cannot successfully handle schemas that contain invalid items, such as
an invalid character in an element name - for example, "City Type" where the space in the element
name is not valid XML. Note:
While MapInfo Professional may be able to process a schema that contains well-formed but invalid XML,
this may cause problems elsewhere, such as during the GetFeature processing. This may cause some
confusion. If the XML returned during GetFeature does not match the schema, MapInfo Professional
may create an empty table without displaying an error.
MapInfo Professional:
• Does not process xsd:include. All element types must be defined in the schema returned from the
DescribeFeatureType request or derived from GML base types.
• Supports all row filters that the server advertises in the GetCapabilities response with the
following constraints:
• The filters are OGC-defined filters as specified in the OGC WFS Specification or the OGC Filter
Encoding Implementation specification.
• The filter takes 0 or 1 arguments beyond the column name. This is a user interface constraint.
MapInfo Professional's interface is currently not set up to address such filters. This includes the A
Between filter, which requires 2 values.
• Supports MaxFeatures, but not all WFS servers seem to support this option. While the OGC
WFS Specification states that the server should implement this option, our experience has been that
some servers ignore MaxFeatures.
• Treats the Geometry column as mandatory. While you can filter specific columns, MapInfo
Professional always requests the Geometry column from the server. Many servers seem to treat the
Geometry column as mandatory and return this column whether it is requested or not.
The GML returned during the GetFeature request should validate against the schema returned
during the DescribeFeatureType request. If this is not the case, then MapInfo Professional may
not be able to create a table. Note:
MapInfo Professional 12.5 416
Enhancing Map Data using a Web Feature Service (WFS)