Allow GeoServer WFS request by featureID

Question

I'm not able to use the featureID parameter in a WFS URL request for my dataset on GeoServer.

Example:

http://demo.opengeo.org/geoserver/wfs?version=1.1.0&service=wfs&request=GetFeature&typeName=topp:tasmania_roads&maxFeatures=10&featureID=tasmania_roads.2

The above URL returns ONE feature because i have appended the &featureID=tasmania_roads.2

The featureID paramter works great with the topp:tasmania_roads dataset on the demo.opengeo.org geoserver and on my geoserver as well.

Howerver, It does NOT work on the layer I have published. And I cannot see any differences. My geoserver is internal so I regret that I cannot provide a URL. But this is how i'm constructing my URL (same way I did for tasmania_roads):

From the GetCapabilities:

...
<FeatureType xmlns:catalog="http://mydomain.com/catalog">
  <Name>catalog:myData</Name>
  <Title>myData</Title>
...

From the GetFeature:

...
<gml:featureMembers>
  <catalog:myData gml:id="myData.fid--57bd457b_134ae684781_8989">
    <catalog:id>190004</catalog:id>
    <catalog:type>SICD</catalog:type>
...

So based on the above information my url should be:

http://myDomain.com/geoserver/wfs?version=1.1.0&service=wfs&request=GetFeature&typeName=catalog:myData&maxFeatures=10&featureID=myData.fid--57bd457b_134ae684781_8989

But I get ZERO results.

I tried URLencoding, republishing and different namespace/feature type naming configurations, with no luck.

I'm thinking there must be a setting on GeoServer when publishing the dataset that I'm overlooking?

Answer 1

Your feature ID looks suspiciously random as in randomly generated by Geoserver. The reason for that is that Geoserver (GeoTools actually) cannot pick a unique identifier from the datastore.

This document, though vague, explains what GeoTools consider a fid:

http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOTOOLS/What+is+a+FID

Solution: if you are using postgis define a Primary Key (though I have not tried, you could get the same result with a unique index) on the table and recreate the layer.

On shapefiles this should not be necessary because GeoServer will use the position of the feature in the shapefile.