Geoserver transform post request to get?

Question

I have the following geoprocessing post request:

<wps:Execute xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://www.opengis.net/wps/1.0.0" xmlns:wfs="http://www.opengis.net/wfs" xmlns:wps="http://www.opengis.net/wps/1.0.0" xmlns:ows="http://www.opengis.net/ows/1.1" xmlns:gml="http://www.opengis.net/gml" xmlns:ogc="http://www.opengis.net/ogc" xmlns:wcs="http://www.opengis.net/wcs/1.1.1" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" version="1.0.0" service="WPS" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.opengis.net/wps/1.0.0    http://schemas.opengis.net/wps/1.0.0/wpsAll.xsd">
<ows:Identifier>gs:BufferFeatureCollection</ows:Identifier>
 <wps:DataInputs>
   <wps:Input>
    <ows:Identifier>features</ows:Identifier>
    <wps:Reference mimeType="text/xml; subtype=wfs-collection/1.0" xlink:href="http://geoserver/wfs" method="POST">
    <wps:Body>
      <wfs:GetFeature xmlns:medford="http://medford.opengeo.org" service="WFS" version="1.0.0" outputFormat="GML2">
      <wfs:Query typeName="medford:firestations"/>
      </wfs:GetFeature>
    </wps:Body>
   </wps:Reference>
  </wps:Input>
  <wps:Input>
    <ows:Identifier>distance</ows:Identifier>
    <wps:Data>
     <wps:LiteralData>0.024</wps:LiteralData>
    </wps:Data>
  </wps:Input>
</wps:DataInputs>
<wps:ResponseForm>
  <wps:RawDataOutput mimeType="text/xml; subtype=wfs-collection/1.0">
  <ows:Identifier>result</ows:Identifier>
 </wps:RawDataOutput>
</wps:ResponseForm>
</wps:Execute>

How can I transform it to get request?

Thanks!

Answer 1

What are you actually trying to achieve here? If you would like to make a this WPS (web processing service) request to the server, then you will need to use a POST action. There is a fairly important difference between POST and GET actions (see HTTP/1.1 Method Definitions) and although in some cases the handlers are incorrectly implemented on the server side according to these specifications, it's best to use the correct one. In this case, you should be using a POST.

Unlike a GET request which you can easily create from within your request url, it's a little more tricky to create a POST request.

You could use curl to create the request, as shown at the botton of the page at http://docs.geoserver.org/stable/en/user/extensions/wps/processes.html, or use the Request Builder as recommended by Geoserver. If you have any experience using Python, then I wrote a request script for a similar query on WFS POST requests (https://gist.github.com/guychisholm/3905362). There are also a few browser plugins which allow you to manually fire up a HTTP Post Request.

Hope this helps