Create a framework in the Explorer to use arbitrary polygon-based shapefiles as filters

[dshorthouse]

Polygons for the National Parks of Canada are available at http://geogratis.gc.ca/api/en/nrcan-rncan/ess-sst/eb3757cc-d08b-5e62-9a44-3a8534ff3249.html. The dbf within contains two columns of data that can be used as options in a drop-down menu: name of park in English & name of park in French & the intersection of geoms (once imported into PostgreSQL/PostGIS) in the occurrence table would show points on the map that fall within that park's boundary(ies). This might be generalized to use any shapefile containing named polygons.

One idea is to use shp2pgsql to create UTF-8 tables from shp files and name them with consistent prefixes (shp_national_parks, shp_provincial_parks, shp_*, etc.) that are subsequently recognized by the model/controller as "filterable". Unless performance is an issue, the relevant columns within each filterable table could be used as select options.