artemp/tickets2issues — Issue #516: Allow more flexible control over plugin initialization
Author: artemp
Created: 2011-10-11 15:22:30+00:00
State: open
Labels: Core_Library

Each plugin initializes various things when the datasource class is called from C++ or python.

It would be useful to factor out all initialization into a separate method so that programs calling mapnik can control when this occurs, potentially deferring initialization until the right time (sometime after a datasource object is created), and allowing programs to modify various parameters and then call ds.initialize().

One specific usecase for this is to allow for the ability to load XML layers definitions and then re-serialize them without actually needing to check for their existence on the filesystem (if you are working with XML layer definitions but don't actually have the files they require).

Another could be where file paths to datasources need to be fixed for some reason, after calling load_map().