Azavea Labs

Where software engineering meets GIS.

Using the CQL_FILTER parameter with OpenLayers WMS layers

I’ve used Openlayer’s Marker layer in several projects and have always just accepted that I can’t display more than around 500 markers at a time for a given query. Recently, I found another way. We’re using GeoServer as a WMS tile server for the tree and municipal boundary layers in GeoServer’s WMS implementation allows an additional parameter in the url called CQL_FILTER. This parameter allows you to use a little language called Common Query Language, or CQL, to apply data filters to the tiles that GeoServer generates. CQL is a plain text, human readable query language created by the OGC, but I like to think of it as an extremely limited third-cousin-by-adoption of SQL. I haven’t found too much in the way of documentation on this obscure little gem, so here’s a rundown of how we used it to display search results in

If you look through the CQL and ECQL page in GeoServer’s documentation, there are several examples but they don’t cover everything you can do with CQL. Basically, a CQL filter is a list of phrases similar to where clauses in SQL, separated by the combiner words AND or OR. You can use the following operators in a CQL phrase:

  • Comparison operations: =, <, >, and combinations
  • Math expressions: +, -, *, /
  • NOT
  • IN
  • LIKE

Some of these operations have examples in the GeoServer documentation, and others can be inferred from the GeoTools documentation (the stuff in their CQL.toFilter() calls). CQL can also call any of GeoServer’s filter functions.You can add parenthesis as needed to affect the order the filters are evaluated in, just like in SQL.

CQL has a lot of power for such a short spec, but it has a one very large deficiency that requires some database designing to avoid: the utter lack of join support. This makes sense when you consider that GeoServer doesn’t know about joins either. Ultimately, you’re using CQL against the GeoServer layer, not the underlying database structure. Building views or adding reference columns to the table GeoServer is accessing can help get around this.

In, we use 4 types of CQL filters: id lookups using =, null checks using IS, date and integer ranges using BETWEEN and text searches using LIKE. Here are examples of those uses along with some array joining to get a valid CQL filter string at the end:

filter_list = []
filter_list.append("species_id = 212")
filter_list.append("height IS NULL")
filter_list.append("dbh BETWEEN 10 and 20")
filter_list.append("neighborhood_id_list LIKE '%42%' ")
cql = ' AND '.join(filter_list)
# should look like this: "species_id = 212 AND height IS NULL AND dbh BETWEEN 10 and 20 AND neighborhood_id_list LIKE '%42%' "

The above CQL filter would locate trees in a specific species, have no height value, only have dbh values between 10 and 20 inches and are in a particular neighborhood. The neighborhood_id_list filter would have been a join if this were written in standard SQL since neighborhoods and trees have a many-to-many relationship in our database. Since we can’t do joins, any time a tree is added or the location is updated, all of it’s related geographies’ ids are added to a reference column on the tree, and used specifically for this type of query.

CQL is passed to GeoServer in the same way as any other WMS variable. We’re using openlayers, so most of the WMS configuration variables are already set when we create the layer. The WMS layer has a little method called mergeNewParams that lets us change those parameters after the layer has been initialized. It also automatically redraws the layer, so the changes take place immediately. To add CQL to the WMS call, just add the CQL_FILTER variable to the layer’s parameters and the layer should update.

wms_layer.mergeNewParams({'CQL_FILTER': "species_id = 212 AND height IS NULL AND dbh BETWEEN 10 and 20 AND neighborhood_id_list LIKE '%42%' "});

You can remove any filters by deleting the parameter from the layer as if it was a normal javascript object. You’ll need to redraw the layer yourself before the change will be visible.

delete wms_layer.params.CQL_FILTER;