Geoserver - filtering points using DWITHIN

Question

First of all I am new to Geoserver and Openlayers. I have been trying to get this working on the Geoserver side using the Layer preview page to view my layer using the Openlayer viewer. I would be implementing it as an Openlayers WFS GET request in the end.

What I am trying to accomplish is to return features that are within a certain distance of different points. (ie. within 5km of a school)

I am using the Layer preview page on Geoserver . I have added the CQL filter of "DWITHIN(GEOM, POINT(-60.2 46.1), 0.05, kilometers)". It has limited the amount of points that were returned but I am unsure if it is filtering correctly.

My questions are as follows:

1. From my understanding because of this bug http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GEOS-937 I have to use degrees for my unit. How can I convert on client side using javascript/openlayers 3 to change 5km into a degree value?
2. Can I add multiple DWITHIN filters to say if a point is within 5km of one point and 10km of another?
3. Can I filter based off feature type? ie return point within 5km of a School AND 10km of a Hospital

Answer 1

After spending some time with this I was able to answer my own question.

First of all doing some searching I determined 1 degree = 111.325 kms approximately. https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20060905051639AAWGjH9

To add multiple DWITHIN filters all you have to do is add an AND between each one. If it is in the WFS format you may have to add %20AND%20 so the spaces are included.

To do a DWITHIN of a certain location you would append the following to your wfs. The point is the long/lat, 0.05 is the degrees from the point, kilometers is the unit that is passed in. When using geoserver it will default to degrees as the link in the original question states.

&CQL_FILTER=DWITHIN(GEOM,Point(-60.2 46.1),0.05,kilometers)

This will return any of the features from your WFS layer that are within the degrees of the point specified.

To filter off of another layer I used info from the following URL http://docs.geoserver.org/2.6.x/en/user/extensions/querylayer/index.html

Firs you must install the proper querylayer module to your version of Geoserer as the link states.

To do the filter based of feature name I used the following CQL_filter:

&CQL_FILTER=DWITHIN(GEOM,collectGeometries(queryCollection('Workspace:AssetLayer','GEOM','AssetTypeID=1')),
 .02,kilometers%29

This will return any features from the WFS layer you are requesting that are within the degrees specified of a feature with the AssetID of 1 from the layer 'Workspace:AssetLayer'.

ie if school had an AssetTypeID of 1, this would return all features from the original layer that were within 0.02 degrees of a school on the 'Workspace:AssetLayer' layer.

The "GEOM" value should be the name of column that holds your geometry data in SQL.

Also, I encoded the last parenthesis in the CQL_Filter "%29" because I found when making the request through openlayers it was stripping it off.

As I said I am new to openlayers/geoserver so this may not work in every case but this is how I figured it out. I am thinking in different projections there may be some changes. Hope this can get you on the right track.