Hi, we are currently evaluating GeoServer as a means to publish our geolocation data with custom attributes. My question is about how custom attribute types can be delivered and rendered in a client like QGIS.
Basically, we have a large DB of geolocations (points), and each point has one or more image URLs attached to it, as well as custom attributes, including lists.
One list might be called ‘point_type’, and be of integer type with allowed values 93, 94, 95. Each value corresponds to some textual description, like “Type A”, “Type B”, “Type C” that is shown to users in our app instead of the raw values.
The table containing our data is published as a layer in GeoServer. So when a GIS client makes a WFS query, it gets the raw data and can display it as such, i.e. the URL is a text string and the list is a number.
My question is: in a standards-conformant GIS client, is it possible to display the actual image instead of the URL, and the textual descriptions instead of the list values?
For textual descriptions, we would also want to include multilingual support, so they can be displayed in a user-defined language.
I suppose XML would be well suited to encode image URLs and custom attribute types, but is this supported in the WFS standard?
I have been searching the WFS specification and the Internet for several hours, but could not find any indication or example of this working. I would like to get more confirmation this is not possible without custom client code though, before looking for a different solution.