[Design Proposal] Add support for WM(T)S as sources

[untereiner]

I start this issue to open a discussion about adding new sources of data for the protocols WMS and WMTS.
National geographic institut, such as the french one, are using these protocols to give access to open data.

I am quite a newbie in this domain but I understood that it is twofold : asking the server for capabilities and then asking for data depending on the capabilities.

My question is: before trying to implement it, shoud it be studied how to transfert the resulting data into this tile spec ?
How should I proceed ?

Side discussion here

[HarelM]

You should be able to support this in maplibre-gl-js using addProtocl I think.
There's also this example:
https://maplibre.org/maplibre-gl-js/docs/examples/add-a-wms-source/
and the following discussion:
maplibre/maplibre-gl-js#2540

If you need the features and then later on to style them it would need a lot more effort I believe and I think you should be able to just use the rasters, don't you?
In any case, I would advise to describe how the style spec changes should look like to have a more practical discussion.

[neodescis]

In our application, we allow the user to add WMS layers to the map. To do this, we have a wizard-style interface:

1. The user enters the WMS server URL, which is normalized to remove any query string parameters
2. An HTTP GetCapabilities request is issued to discover available layers. We use the wms-capabilities library to aid in creating the request and interpreting the response (i.e. parsing the XML). Even using a standalone DOM parser would work though.
3. The available layers are presented to the user, and the user can choose which layer(s) to add
4. The wizard closes. Only then are the layers added to the map's style, in the form referenced above.

In my opinion, this is the ideal approach, in terms of both UX and MapLibre support. I'm not sure anything needs to be added to MapLibre or the style spec.

[untereiner]

Thank you both. I will have a look to your links. I didn’t mention that I target a C++ implementation.