MapGuide tidbits: RenderTile (or: Build Your Own Tile Management system)

Here's a little tidbit about tiles in MapGuide.

Are you not satisfied with MapGuide's tile management? The fact that saving a Map Definition blows away your precious tiles? The fact that you have no control where rendered tiles are stored?

Well it just so happens that the functional primitive for rendering tiles is also available in the MapGuide API: The RenderTile() method of MgRenderingService. This API only renders the tile, it does not store it in MapGuide's pre-defined tile location. The tile storage and management is completely up to you to implement. You can think of the GetTile() method of MgTileService as simply being RenderTile() with tile access/management built in. If you don't like how MapGuide does its tile management, you can implement this part yourself, and call RenderTile() yourself for the actual tiles.

Although we don't use this API in mapguide-rest for XYZ tiles, we follow the same concept of doing the tile access and management ourselves at the PHP level, but still tapping into the actual MapGuide API itself to render the actual XYZ "tiles".

This approach does have its own downsides. The automatic tile cache invalidation that MapGuide does when dependent upstream resources are saved and some users find annoying won't be at play here. You'll have to manually purge these cached tiles yourself, otherwise you may find that your cached tiles are horribly visually out-of-sync with respect to the current Map Definition and its layer structure and styles. This is what the automatic tile cache invalidation is trying to prevent, only it does it with the surgical precision of a nuclear warhead.