Please ignore first comment I copied the wrong thing into this bug, sorry....



This enhancement request will be better defined during SLD development. This bug
was entered to have this issue visibly documented.

In an effort to have more complete Legend Templates automatically generated from
map files, either by using the LegendTemplate Widget, ContextSelect Widget or
future developed Widgets; a serious limitation has been noted.  

As most people know ;) the HTML Legend Template allows the user to display
within a legend either: groups, layers or classes. Since, the parameter STATUS
"ON/OFF/DEFAULT" is only used at the Layer level. The applications can only
allowing the user to turn on/off groups of layers at once, or single layers
within the map file. While in the ContextSelect Widget only Layers or groups of
layers can be displayed in a legend.

Since the enhancement of mapscript to have min/max zoom levels defined in the
class, there has been a shift in how we define our layers. Meaning that the
Class Objects can be considered more as the Layer definition, while Layer Object
is used to define the different Data sets.   

So logically, the enhancement request would be to have Classes to be just as
flexible as Layers. 
1)	CLASSSTATUS -> Turn ON/OFF parameter
2)	GROUPCLASS -> To group class when building a legend and to have the ability
to turn ON and OFF the layer(s) in the legend. 

There may be other enhancements required related to this Legend/Class issues.

is this a MapServer enhancement or a Chameleon enhancement?

updated version to 1.99

Yes this sounds like a mapserver enhancement, but it is also related to all
legend widgets.

Will this be an enhancement to mapserver?

What a long bug, I almost missed the point. 
Here is what it's about in 2 lines:
 - We would like to have STATUS ON/OFF on classes
 - We would like to have the ability to GROUP classes

With respect to this being added to MapServer, my opinion is:

- Class STATUS may be added some day if we have a good real life use case for
it. (There is already a STATUS member in the classObj in MapServer but it is
unused at the moment.)
- Class GROUPs are unlikely to ever be added unless we have a real life use for
that. It seems to me that a layer *is* a group of classes and should be used for
that.

My agrument is that a Layer should only define the data it is pointing to. That
since we have applied min scale max scale to classes, the status of a class
should be configurable.

For group classes, this would also make sense to have since classes are
technically the true sense of a mapserver layer, that the only way to create a
new group of classes of the same layer you would have to create a new layer,
duplicating the information. 

Having the option to reducing the number of layers in a single mapfile is the
point of my argument. 

Changed target milestone to 2.1.

Changed Target Milestone to FUTURE. (Enhancements may be moved from this target 
to specific "versioned" targets after product design review cycles.)