Adding time dimension to coverage in geoserver

Question

I'd like to add a time dimension to my coverage in GeoServer. I've seen quite a few questions on this in this stack exchange but the solutions don't really work for me.

I need to do this via the REST API, without the ImageMosaic plugin and without changing the file names.

I however first tried with the GUI. I am following the instructions in

http://docs.geoserver.org/stable/en/user/data/webadmin/layers.html#data-webadmin-layers-edit-dimensions

I get immediately stuck because it says there is no time information available.

I looked into the other parts of the GUI to see where I could specify the time for my layer. My best bet was the metadata section but it seems this part is irrelevant.

So, my question is, how do I specify the time for my layer (given that I don't want to use image mosaic nor can I change the name of the file).

Answer 1

GeoServer requires that you use an image mosaic if you want a time dimension for a set of coverages. This is because it must pick from a set of coverages the one that matches the requested time (or all the ones with in the requested time period).

If you can not encode the time of acquisition in the file name then you will need to skip the part of the mosaic creation where you set the time period up using the regexp and manually edit a time column into the index (either the database table or shapefile if you didn't provide a database).

If you want you could also make use of grib or netcdf formats that provide a way to encode time in the metadata of the file (though I've never tested this).