Temporal coverages dynamically reloaded from data store in GeoServer

Question

I'm pretty new to GeoServer. I would like to serve results of a simulation that concerns geospatial data as a Web Coverage Service (it has to be OGC compliant). The individual steps of the simulation (similar to movie frames) should be uploaded to the server. Currently the results are simply series of files with some basic metadata. Client may want to ask for a specific period of time that should be returned (specific set of frames).

I would like to write my own data store format (GeoServer extension) for reading simulation results that would be kept in some directory. However, I see 3 problems with doing this with the GeoServer:

1. There is only a 1-1 relation between data store and layer. That is I would have to create separate data stores for each simulation. Because each simulation is of the same kind it would be more reasonable to keep them in one store.
2. The layers do not refresh themselves at runtime. That is, if a new data appears in a data store then it is not visible by the layer. The layer needs to be recreated.
3. I am worried about the support of time-querying of coverages or multidimensional coverages. I read somewhere that those are not supported well by the GeoServer.

Another approach is to create layers and data stores dynamically using REST interface when new simulation results are available. This doesn't look like a proper way, though.

Am I right about above issues? Is there any convenient way for doing this with GeoServer?

I am using GeoServer 2.2-beta.

EDIT:

We eventually ended up implementing our own simple WCS service that meets our needs. However, because the ImageMosaic plugin did work when it comes to series of time-related data (the problem was we still had to create new layers manually) I accept Andrea Aime's answer.

Answer 1

Have a look at the image mosaic store, it is used in GeoServer 2.2.x to provide support for time/elevation over a list of rasters co-referenced and with the same resolution, but associated to different time/elevation (or other attribute).

The mosaic index can be stored in a database too (there are no docs about it right now, but you can look in the java unit tests in Geotools gt-imagemosaic module to see how that's done), we use that to dynamically add new tiles with associated metadata and GeoServer exposes them automatically, no need to add new layer or force any kind of refresh.

Some extra info here: http://geo-solutions.blogspot.it/2009/12/adding-time-support-to-geoserver-and.html