Friday, October 8, 2010

Sending command-line admin requests to MapViewer

As you already know, MapViewer has several web pages where you can (after logging in) perform various admin tasks using XML requests. These tasks range from managing mapviewer's metadata cache, data sources, to tile layer pre-fetching.

Sometimes one may have the need to perform these tasks from a command line or script. This is especially helpful if you need to automate certain aspects of managing a MapViewer instance (such as periodically clearing its tile layer cache or metadata cache).

A while back we uploaded a simple tool that enables just that. If you are interested, please go to MapViewer's download page on OTN:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/mapviewer/downloads/index.html

and look for the Oracle Fusion Middleware MapViewer Admin Tool. It comes with a detailed readme describing how to use this tool to send admin requests to MapViewer server from a command line or from a script.

Basically this tool allows you to specify the user name and password for the MapViewer admin URLs, and a XML document containing the admin request itself. It will then authenticate to the MapViewer and post the request doc to the server for processing.