WFS (Video)

How to allow other GIS applications to directly connect to Diamond Maps and view your map.

Video Transcript

Diamond Maps now supports Web Feature Services. WFS is a protocol that allows one GIS system to programmatically read and sometimes even modify data shored in another GIS system. Diamond Maps has a read-only WFS server built into in. That allows third parties to connect to any map and download its content. Let me demonstrate. Here we have a demo map hosted on Diamond Maps. You can see there are several layers here just like municipality or utility might have. The important thing we need to note here is the map ID. Every diamond Maps map has a unique ID. This map ID is needed by the third party to connect to the map via WFS. I'm going to use QGIS as an example third party GIS application that could use WFS to connect our demo map. Other GIS applications like ARCGIS would have different steps, but the main concept will be the same. In QGIS you click Layer, Data Source Manager, and then select WFS option. Over here, click New. Under the server connection details, give this new connection a descriptive name. This doesn't have to match the name of your map, and the more important part of this connection is the bas URL that tell QGIS the web address of the WFS server hosting this data. For this example, I'm going to call this the demo map. Here in the URL, you want to type the address exactly like this: https://diamondmaps.com/wfs.ashhx?mid=. This is where you'd put this unique map ID that I pointed out earlier. Authentication will be required in most cases to read data from a customer's map hosted on Diamond Maps. The same viewing and editing permissions enforced in the Diamond Maps application are enforced here in the WFS client. In order to connect to this maps WFS server, you must provide the username and password of one of the users on the customer's account. You can either enter that username and password here on the basic authentication tab or you can leave it blank. QGIS will prompt you for those credentials whenever you click Connect. If your WFS client application does not have the ability to provide these credentials, the Diamond Maps customer could get around this by creating a separate map that contains only the layers needed by the WFS client and mark that map as public in Diamond Maps. In that case, we wouldn't need to provide QGIS with any username or password. Next, click OK. Here at the top, click Connect. If the connection is successful, you'll see a list of layers belonging to this map. Remember when we provided QGIS with the web address with our WFS server, it contained a map ID, so this list of layers is just the layers contained in that map. Finally, to add one or more of these layers to your map, you can just select them. Click the Add button. As you can see, they have now been added to our QGIS.If we clicked on one of these features, we can see the attributes of it just as it is displayed in Diamond Maps.