GetFeature

GetFeature is an operation of the Web Feature Service (WFS), an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard that exposes geographic features over the web. The GetFeature request retrieves one or more features from a WFS server and returns them in a structured geospatial encoding such as GML or GeoJSON, depending on the requested outputFormat.

The request targets one or more feature types, identified by typeName, and can be refined with a variety of constraints. Common controls include Filter Encoding Standard (FES) filters to specify attribute or spatial conditions, a bounding box (bbox) or spatial envelope, and propertyName to limit the attributes returned. The amount of data can be limited with maxFeatures (or count in some versions), and the result can be requested in different formats via outputFormat. Some implementations support a resultType parameter to request either full feature data (results) or only a count of matching features (hits).

Transport and formats: GetFeature is typically invoked over HTTP, using GET for simple queries and POST for more complex queries or large payloads. The response encoding depends on the requested format and the WFS version, with GML and GeoJSON being common options. Compatibility and features vary by server and version, but GetFeature remains the primary mechanism for programmatically retrieving vector data from a WFS service.

Versions and ecosystem: GetFeature is defined across WFS specifications (early 1.x and newer 2.x). It is implemented by major GIS servers such as GeoServer, MapServer, and ArcGIS Server, and is commonly used in GIS applications and web mapping workflows to integrate vector datasets from distributed sources.