Open Web Services Inspector#

The Tools menu in the user interface includes the “OwS Inspector” button. This opens a new window containing the Open Web Services Inspector.

The MapServer Studio toolbar with the OwS Inspector button

OwS Inspector is a separate open source project, developed for MapServer Studio, for testing Open Web Service requests (such as WMS) against geospatial servers. You can test the standalone version at https://ows.mapserverstudio.net/.

The advantage of integrating it into MapServer Studio is that is makes it very easy to see the effect of Mapfile changes on WMS and WFS servers as shown in the video below.

Note

If you have made changes in your Mapfile - remember to press “Serve”. This will update the “Server URL” in the Open Web Services Inspector window to point to the new Mapfile.