THL Toolbox > Developers' Zone > Gis Development > Requesting Gml, Kml, And Shapefiles From Geoserver
Requesting Gml, Kml, and Shapefiles from Geoserver
Contributor(s): Tom Benner
GeoServer provides methods of requesting data in commonly-used formats, such as GML, KML and shapefile. To determine which features are returned, you should include a CQL filter in the cql_filter parameter.
- To get data for a single feature, the cql_filter parameter and value would look like this: "cql_filter=(fid=200)".
- To get data all features of a specific feature type, the cql_filter parameter and value would look like this: "cql_filter=(object_type=59)".
CQL also allows for boolean expressions and other expressions. For more information on CQL, see OpenLayers.
For the THL's GeoServer instance, the URLs of these data requests have the following formats, where "[cql]" should be replaced with CQL (e.g. "(object_type=59)"):
Shapefile
GML
KML
Using the Place Dictionary's GIS Resource Web Service
Since the above URLs involve a number of parameters that may be somewhat opaque to some users, we also provide a GIS resource web service in the Place Dictionary, which makes similar queries to the ones above, but involves far fewer parameters. Information on this can be found in Using RoR Place Dictionary Web Services.