• the future of processing providers: should they be part of QGIS code or handled independently as plugins?
• the road forward to a better bug reporting system and CI platform: move to gitlab?
• the certification program for QGIS training courses: how (and how much) training companies should give back to the project?
• SWOT analysis of current QGIS project: very interesting discussion about the status of the project.
• QGIS Qt Quick modules for mobile QGIS app

• How to set up a development environment and make your first pull request
• How to write tests for QGIS (in both python and C++)

Did you know that the possibilities to make a full QGIS back end solution for quality assurance and archiving in PostgreSQL are immense? SQL has it’s well known limitations, but with a little bit creativity you can make quite nice solutions just using triggers and rules. In this post I’ll explain what we did lately based on a project with a customer. He needed to assure the consistency of data but still give his employees the possibility of a fast feeding of the data collected on the field to the database. Another request was to keep every status of the data with the information about the changes (archiving). It’s always the question, where to put the logical part of the solution. QGIS is quite powerful with constraints, but the undeniable advantage of a back end solution is, that you can use any front end - no matter what configuration you have on QGIS or what Feature Manipulation Engine (FME) you use - without influencing the guarantee of data validity.

Situation

It’s all about trees

At least for that customer we got lately. The customer owns pieces of land all over Switzerland. On this pieces are forests and in the forests are - as expected - trees. Well, mostly - if you are not a bark beetle or a squirrel - you don’t care about a single tree. Except if there is something special with it. For example, a branch that could fell down on your brand new Citroën DS or if the tree has a disease that could kill the whole forest, that is actually needed to convert the carbon dioxide (from your DS) into oxygen. The issuetrees (yellow) lie on the forest (green) - and the forest lies on the land piece (brown). And the (Entity Relationship Model) ERM looks like this. A land can have zero, one or more forests - and a forest can have zero, one or more trees with issues.

It’s not really about trees

The situation is, that a lot of field workers (so called tree-inspectors) work with our mobile solution QField , where they can collect the data while standing in the middle of a wild forest with one foot in a rabbit hole and the other one in the stinging nettle. It’s quite possible and usual that there can be some problems entering all the data correctly. Typing issues on the tablet while running away from wolves or just lack of concentration because of the beauty of the swiss forests.

And it’s about lots of front ends

But there are not only the tree-inspectors. There are the office-clerks working with QGIS and planning, when the problems on the tree has to be solved. And finally there are the woodsmen solving the issues and setting the status to done on QField again. So there have to be a lot of projects using the same data but with different configurations. If you make all the quality assurance on the front end you won’t have time to care about the trees anymore and beside of that it’s fault-prone.

Quality assurance in the back end

Data integrity with constraint functions

There are simple constraints like that a field is not empty and more complex constraints with a lot of logic regarding the content of the field.

Simple constraints

Lots of data integrity issues can be solved by using simple constraints like NOT NULL (column must not assume null), UNIQUE (column must be unique among all the rows in table) or Primary Key and Foreign Keys constraints.

CREATE TABLE live.issuetree (
  issuetree_id integer UNIQUE NOT NULL,
  gps_id text NOT NULL,
  issue text,
  assignee text,
  done boolean,
  donedate date,
  forest_id NOT NULL,
  CONSTRAINT issuetree_pkey PRIMARY KEY (issuetree_id),
  CONSTRAINT forest_fkey FOREIGN KEY (forest_id) REFERENCES live.forest;
);

Checks and constraint functions

For more special cases or not really technical constraints, we can use checks. Here for example: If the issue is done, then it needs to have a donedate. But not if done is not TRUE (NULL or FALSE).

CHECK (done IS NOT TRUE OR donedate IS NOT NULL )

And if these cases are more complex and not technical at all, we can put it to a function and use the return value (for example the error message) as condition. In the following example we want to assure that assignee is the name of one of the employed woodsmen. Of course it can be NULL too.

CONSTRAINT chk_assignee_valid CHECK (live.chk_assignee_valid(assignee) = ''::text)

And the function live.chk_assignee_valid:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION live.chk_assignee_valid(a_assignee text ) RETURNS text
LANGUAGE plpgsql AS $$
DECLARE
result text;
BEGIN
  IF (
    SELECT TRUE
    WHERE a_assignee NOT IN ( 'Fritz Fangorn' ,  'Fiona Finglas',  'Fred Fladrif', 'Barbara Beechbone', 'Berthold Bregalad' )
          AND a_assignee IS NOT NULL
  ) THEN
    result='The assignee has to be one of these guys: Fritz Fangorn, Fiona Finglas, Fred Fladrif, Barbara Beechbone, Berthold Bregalad';
    RAISE EXCEPTION '%', result;
  ELSE
    RAISE NOTICE 'CHECK chk_assignee_valid SUCCESSFUL';
    result='';
  END IF;
  RETURN result;
END;

So with many of these constraints, we can assure a lot and the data are fully correct. But this is not always comfortable to use. Why? Go on reading…

Using of a “data quarantine”

Let’s imagine that the tree-inspector collected all day data in QField. Standing in the middle of the mentioned stinging nettle and rabbit holes, running from wolves etc… Of course he made some mistakes while collecting data. In the evening he returns tired to the office, already thinking about the dinner meal his wife is cooking (or his husband, of course), and wants to upload the data from the QField project to the database. And what happens? Lot’s of error messages. He thinks about to solve them tomorrow, because his wife (or his husband) can get quite angry when he is late for dinner. But if he does it tomorrow, the data are only stored on the device and nowhere else overnight. He need to have them in the database. No matter, if correct or not. And this leads to the idea of the “data quarantine”.

Use Case

All data entered to the database (valid or not) need to be stored. The entries accepted from the so called live tables with all constraints, are stored normally. The entries failed because of the constraint, are stored in another table. In the so called quarantine table. So you have for every live table another quarantine table. This means, we need another table structure existing parallel to the live tables. We do it in two schemas: The live schema and the quarantine schema. So the tree-inspector synchronizes his QField without any problem to the database. The correct entries are written into the live tables. The incorrect into the quarantine. Actually all the data are coming into the quarantine and there is a Trigger passing them through to the live table. If they success, they will be stored in live and removed from quarantine. Otherwise they keeps staying in the quarantine. Same situation when the quarantine-clerk later corrects the data entries in the quarantine. On an update they are pushed into the live-table. If success, all good. Otherwise the entry keeps staying in the quarantine.

Structure

And how we do that?

It’s all solved by using triggers. SQL triggers are procedural code that are automatically executed on an action on a table or view. For this solution we actually need two trigger per quarantine table. After insert into or update quarantine table, a trigger should be fired for every entry, doing this: Insert the same entry into the live table. If success, then delete the entry in the quarantine table. Else write the info to the current entry in the quarantine table. Probably you noticed the problem with the recursion, but let’s not think about it at the moment :-)

Code

In PostgreSQL we can use trigger functions. Means you have the triggers on the table calling the functions.

Trigger on table quarantine.issuetree after update

CREATE TRIGGER pushtolive
AFTER UPDATE
ON quarantine.issuetree
FOR EACH ROW
EXECUTE PROCEDURE quarantine.pushtolive();

Trigger function (simplified)

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION quarantine.pushtolive() RETURNS trigger AS $BODY$
BEGIN
  INSERT INTO live.issuetree
  SELECT * FROM quarantine.issuetree
  WHERE quarantine_serial = NEW.quarantine_serial
  RETURN NEW;
END; $BODY$
LANGUAGE plpgsql;

Trigger function used for the solution when inserting into live

And this is the function with the logical part with success and failing.

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION quarantine.pushtolive() RETURNS trigger AS $BODY$
BEGIN
-- insert into live
INSERT INTO live.issuetree
SELECT * FROM quarantine.issuetree
WHERE quarantine_serial = NEW.quarantine_serial
RAISE NOTICE 'Inserted row in live.issuetree';
-- delete in quarantine
DELETE FROM quarantine.issuetree
WHERE quarantine_serial = NEW.quarantine_serial
RAISE NOTICE 'Deleted row in quarantine.issuetree';
-- return when here
RETURN NEW;
-- if it failed:
EXCEPTION WHEN OTHERS THEN
  RAISE NOTICE 'EXCEPTION: %', SQLERRM;
  UPDATE quarantine.issuetree
  SET fail_info = SQLERRM,
  WHERE NEW.quarantine_serial = quarantine_serial;
  RAISE NOTICE 'Updated row in quarantine.issuetree';
  RETURN NEW;
END; $BODY$

As you can see, we use here an id called quarantine_serial. We can not use the primary key in the quarantine, because here everything is accepted and so nothing of the entered data (not even issuetree_id) has to be be unique. But to identify the entry in the quarantine table we create the serial quarantine_serial.

Trigger function used for the solution when inserting into or update live

Actually the trigger function before is not usable. Because it works only to insert new data into the live system. Now we remember the use case. The trigger here in the quarantine does not know if the tree-inspector created a new issuetree or updated an old one. On synchronization he made an INSERT INTO to the quarantine with all entries. But these could be new entries (new trees) or already existing ones in the live table. So the trigger function has to decide, if it’s an insert or an update on the live table.

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION quarantine.pushtolive() RETURNS trigger AS $BODY$
BEGIN
-- check if an entry with this id is already existing
IF( SELECT TRUE FROM live.issuetree WHERE issuetree_id = NEW.issuetree ) THEN
  -- update into live
  UPDATE live.issuetree
  SET gps_id = NEW.gps_id, issue = NEW.issue, assignee = NEW.assignee, done = NEW.done, date = NEW.date, forest_id = NEW.forest_id
  WHERE issuetree_id = NEW.issuetree_id
  RAISE NOTICE 'Updated row in live.issuetree';
ELSE
  -- insert into live
  INSERT INTO live.issuetree ( issuetree_id, gps_id, issue, assignee, done, date, forest_id )
  VALUES ( NEW.issuetree_id, NEW.gps_id, NEW.issue, NEW.assignee, NEW.done, NEW.date, NEW.forest_id )
  RAISE NOTICE 'Inserted row in live.issuetree';
END IF;
-- delete in quarantine
DELETE FROM quarantine.issuetree
WHERE quarantine_serial =NEW.quarantine_serial
RAISE NOTICE 'Deleted row in quarantine.issuetree';
-- return when here
RETURN NEW;
-- if it failed:
EXCEPTION WHEN OTHERS THEN
  RAISE NOTICE 'EXCEPTION: %', SQLERRM;
  UPDATE quarantine.issuetree
  SET fail_info=SQLERRM,
  WHERE NEW.quarantine_serial = quarantine_serial;
  RAISE NOTICE 'Updated row in quarantine.issuetree';
  RETURN NEW;
END; $BODY$

Recursion problem

The problem with the recursion is that we have a trigger after update of table issuetree in quarantine. This trigger calls the function, and the function (in case of fail updating live) updates the quarantine.issuetree with the error-message. So there is another update and the trigger is fired again, and again, and again… ♪Across the universe♬ We could solve the problem by checking the depth of triggers in PostgreSQL:

CREATE TRIGGER pushtolive AFTER UPDATE ON quarantine.issuetree
FOR EACH ROW
WHEN pg_trigger_depth() = 0
EXECUTE PROCEDURE quarantine.pushtolive();

And it looks like this

The yellow points are the issue trees in the live. If we create another one and have a mistake in it (GPS Id wrong), then it’s stored in the quarantine (pink). When we correct the data it’s written over the quarantine trigger into live. If succeeded, the point changes the color to yellow. Actually the yellow point appears (live) and the pink point(quarantine) disappears, because the entry is inserted into live and deleted in quarantine.

Archiving all data

There are different reasons why you need to archive data. Maybe somewhen you want to show your grandchildren, how much forest we still had today before the sky got dark. But this was not the reason for the mentioned customer, but legal reasons: When the woodsman cuts the last bamboo tree of the forest and this was the only food for the very last living panda bear of Switzerland, we need to know who created or changed this entry in the database and what tree should have been chopped down instead.

Third schema “archive”

So we created a third schema parallel to live and quarantine. The archive schema. This means every table in live does not only have a quarantine table accordingly, but also an archive table too where all the old status of entries including the timestamp, when it has been archived. Of course not only the changed live data are stored in the archive, but also every changed data from quarantine.

Use Case 1

The tree-inspector enters an entry of an issue tree that already existed in the live table to the quarantine (1). The after insert trigger is fired and it tries to write to the live table. And with success. The entry is written to the live table (2). This means, before the entry in live is updated, the old one was copied to the archive table (3). Then in the same transaction the entry in the quarantine is deleted (1). Means the old status is copied to the archive too (4). So there will be the updated entry in the live-table (2), no entry in the quarantine-table (1) and two entries (3 and 4) in the archive table.

Use Case 2

The tree-inspector enters an entry of an issue tree that already existed in the live table to the quarantine (1). The after insert trigger is fired and it tries to write to the live table. And it fails. The entry in the quarantine will be updated with the error-message (2). The old status is copied to archive (1). The office clerk makes no the changes to this entries. The trigger is fired and this time it could write into the live-table with success (3). So the old entry is copied to the archive (4) and after deleting the entry in the quarantine, there will be the second old status of quarantine (5) in archive too. So there will be the updated entry in the live-table (3), no entry in the quarantine-table (1 and 2) and three entries (1, 4 and 5) in the archive table.

Structure

And how we do that?

It’s solved by using triggers too. We actually need only one trigger per table, but not only in quarantine, but also in live. It has to be fired before every update of every entry, doing this: Insert a copy of the current entry into the archive table with the status it had until the update we are doing right now.

Code

It’s the same code for the live and the quarantine table triggers. So only the ones for the quarantine are explained.

Trigger on table quarantine.issuetree before update

CREATE TRIGGER archiving
BEFORE UPDATE
ON quarantine.issuetree
FOR EACH ROW
EXECUTE PROCEDURE quarantine.archiving();

Trigger Function (simplified)

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION quarantine.archiving() RETURNS trigger AS $BODY$
BEGIN
  INSERT INTO archive.issuetree
  SELECT *
  FROM quarantine.issuetree
  WHERE NEW.quarantine_serial = quarantine_serial;
END; $BODY$
LANGUAGE plpgsql;

And the archive-tables have a default time-column to store the time, when the entry has been archived:

ar_time timestamp without time zone DEFAULT now()

That’s it

That’s what I just needed to tell you. It was a very interesting project and I liked working on it. Thanks for reading so far. If you have questions, improvement suggestions or anything else to tell me, then please comment it. See yah! :-)

./configure -prefix /opt/qt593 -debug -opensource -confirm-license -ccache -platform linux-clang

make -j9
sudo make install

/opt/qt593/bin/qmake WebKit.pro
make -j9
sudo make install

/opt/qt593/bin/qmake qscintilla.pro
make -j9
sudo make install

/opt/qt593/bin/qmake qwt.pro
make -j9
sudo make install

You may have seen my earlier tutorial where I described how to make nice looking hillshaded maps in QGIS using SRTM elevation data. Well, we don’t have to stop with just one hillshade layer on a map, it is possible to overlay multiple hillshades; a procedure that can increase the visual quality and detail. The following image is the hillshade we made before. Once you re-create a hillshade, following the previous tutorial, you can head to the next step (note that brightness and contrast settings may be different due to changes in how QGIS generates and displays hillshades).

We can improve the SRTM hillshade further by adding ESRI’s World Hillshade layer, which uses multi-directional illumination (also called a Swiss Hillshade in tribute to the celebrated Swiss cartographer Eduard Imhof). In addition, World Hillshade has a much higher resolution than SRTM 30m data in some regions of the world, it is 2m for most of the England and Wales, 10m for most of the US, 5m for Spain and 3m for Holland etc. The only drawback is that the style of this layer is somewhat controversial, some love it, some hate it, it looks like it’s illuminated from above, but mixing it with the SRTM hillshade obviates some of it criticised flaws.

To add the World Hillshade layer in QGIS go to the Layer Menu – Add Layer – Add ArcGIS MapServer Layer – click New and add the following URL:

https://services.arcgisonline.com/arcgis/rest/services/Elevation/World_Hillshade/MapServer

Notice QGIS 2.18 no longer needs a plugin to add ESRI layers, it new has this functionality built in. Also, open the url in a browser such as Firefox, it brings up a webpage that describes the layer. We also see links to other other layers. Yes, they can all be added to QGIS by simply taking the URL of the webpage that describe the layer and connecting to it via the ArcGIS MapServer Layer connector.

Name the layer World Hillshade and click Connect, then click and highlight the layer it connects to. Finally, click the Add button to add the layer to the canvas.

Next, we need to adjust the properties of the World Hillshade layer to properly overlay it above the SRTM hillshade layer. Make sure the World hillshade layer is the topmost layer. In the Layers Panel, right click Layer properties and in the window that opens up, click Style (if not visible). Next, change the Layer Blending mode (under color rendering) to Overlay. Adjust the layer’s brightness to around -20 and leave contrast at 0. If you find the scene is still too dark, brighten the SRTM Hillshade by increasing the layer’s brightness. You may also have to change (lower) the Min value of the Min – Max value boxes. Leave the contrast at 0 for the SRTM hillshade. Also, don’t brighten it too much as it might become washed out, loose detail, especially in bright areas. Play around the controls, settings may vary depending on the SRTM data you download and the version of QGIS you use.

Here’s a comparison in Ireland, a ring like structure of hills with a central peak. No, it’s not a meteorite crater. It’s a different kind of geological marvel, the Slieve Gullion Complex and its ring dyke; the deeply eroded remains of a 410 million year old Caledonian volcano. The SRTM hillshade is on the left and World Hillshade + SRTM hillshade is on the right (click on the image, it’s best appreciated full size):

We can see the World Hillshade + SRTM Hillshade layer shows much finer detail. We see a parallel array of roughly north-south orientated lines, these are fractures and faults that cut the Slieve Gullion Complex that were perhaps enhanced by glacial erosion. Also, look carefully, there seems to be some roads meandering across the landscape (hint, bottom of the map and right of the scale bar). You should get even better results with higher resolution World Hillshade data. We also notice that bending SRTM derived hillshade with World Hillshade adds a naturalistic illumination not apparent in multi-directional hillshading. So we have the best of both worlds, a high resolution hillshade and realistic looking illumination.

Hope you found this tutorial helpful.

References:

Baxter, S., 2008. A Geological Field Guide to Cooley Gullion, Mourne & Slieve Croob [pdf]. Geological Survey of Ireland, Dublin. p. 43-53.

Geologists display the dip and strike of rock layers on geological maps using a dip and strike symbol, where dip in degrees indicates the maximum angle a rock layer descends relative to the horizontal. However, it is not directly possible in QGIS 2.18, using basic label settings, to place and orient a dip label next to a dip and strike symbol.

However, there is a way around this issue using Trigonometry and editing the layer’s Attribute Table. This method may be useful for controlling the position and orientation of labels around point features in general. The first step involves adding values to the Attribute Table. First, add these two new columns:

• Angle – 0° is North and values increases clockwise up to 359°
• Distance – label distance from a point feature

You can add Angle and Distance values to these columns manually or use the Field Calculator (see below) to add values if you have lots of points. Also, I chose Map Units (not millimeters) for Symbol Size, Font Size and Distance for my map, as I prefered to keep symbol size, font size and position of labels fixed when zooming in and out.

Note – I use Strike (Angle) and Label Distance (Distance)  in my Attribute Table

The next step is to control the position of the label around the points using trigonometry. Right click the points layer and choose:

Properties – Labels – Placement

Check that Offset From Point is checked and then click the Data Defined Override next to the Offset X, Y boxes and choose Edit. The Expression String Builder will appear. Enter the following expression in the Expression String Builder window:

to_string ( ((-1) * ( “Distance” )) * cos ( radians ( “Angle” ))) ||’,’|| to_string (((-1) * ( “Distance” )) * sin ( radians ( “Angle” )) )

The expression takes the angle and distance values from the Attribute Table (edited earlier) and calculates an X, Y label position relative to the point feature. You may also optionally control the angle of a symbol or icon itself via:

Layer Properties – Style – click Data Defined Override icon – Edit

Then enter the following expression in the Data Defined Override dialogue:

“Angle” – 90

Finally, to control the rotation of label text, so text follows the orientation (angle) of a rotating symbol or icon, choose:

Layer Properties – Labels – Placement – Data Defined – Rotation

Click the Data Defined Override Icon again and then choose Edit. Enter the following expression in the Data Defined Override dialogue:

(“Angle” – 90) * -1

The following geological map of the Old Head of Kinsale in southern Ireland shows the results of the above procedure. We see that the dip labels rotate and currently follow the orientation of the dip and strike symbols (note that the points are at the intersection of the T symbol).

Geological Survey of Ireland – Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license

You may have several different symbols, of various sizes, each requiring an appropriate label distance expressed in the Attribute Table. It took me a few tries before I found the right distances for my geological symbols, from 90 to 230 meters distance depending on the symbol size and type.

Lastly, the expressions “Angle” – 90 and (“Angle” – 90) * -1 were necessary in my case because I needed to place my labels next to the dip and strike symbol’s barb. You may need to use a different expression e.g. “Angle” and (“Angle”) * -1, or a value other than 90° depending on the symbol used and the prefered label placement location. Some trial and error is may be required to find the correct label position.

• fixed some bugs and feature requests on the official QGIS plugin repo that I’m maintaining since the very beginning
• make the QGIS official plugin repository website mobile-friendly
• QGIS Server Python Plugin API refactoring, I’ve completed the work on the new API, thanks to the ongoing server refactoring it’s now much cleaner than it was in the first version
• attribute table bugs: I started to address some nasty bugs in the attribute table, some of those were fixed during the week right after the hackfest
• unified add layer button, we had a productive meeting where we decided the path forward to implement this feature, thanks to Boundless that is funding the development, this feature is what’s I’m currently working on these days

A year ago I have asked QGIS’s community what were their favourite QGIS new features from 2015 and published this blog post. This year I decided to ask it again. In 2016, we add the release of the second long-term release (2.14 LTR), and two other stable versions (2.16 and 2.18).

2016 was again very productive year for the QGIS community, with lots of improvements and new features landing on QGIS source code, not to speak of all the work already in place for QGIS 3. This is a great assurance of the project’s vitality.

As a balance, I have asked users to choose wich were their favorite new features during 2016 (from the visual changelogs list). As a result, I got the following Top 5 features list.

5 – Paste a style to multiple selected layers or to all layers in a legend group (2.14)

This is a productivity functionaly that I just realized that existed now, with so many people voting on it. If copy/paste styles was, in my opinion, a killer feature, being able to use it in multiple layers or even a group is just great.

4 – fTools plugin has been replaced with Processing algorithms (2.16)

While checking the Vector Menu, the tools seem the same as previous version, but it’s when you open them that you understand the difference. All vector tools, provided until now by the fTools core plugin, were replaced by equivalent processing Algoritms. For the users it means easier access to more functionality, like running the tools in batch mode, or getting outputs as temporary layers. Besides some of the tools have been improved.

3 – Virtual layers (2.14)

This is definitly one of my favourite new features, and it seems I’m not alone. With virtual layers you can run SQL queries using the layers loaded in the project, even when the layers are not stored in a relational database. We are not talking about WHERE statments to filter data, with this you can do real SQL queries, with spatial analysis, aggregations, and so on. Besides, virtual layers will act as VIEWs and any changes to any of the input layers will automatically update the layer.

2 – Speed and memory improvements (2.14)

It’s no surprise that speed and memory improvements we one of the most voted features. Lots of improvements were made for loading and managing large datasets, and this have a tremendous impact in all users. According to the changelog, zoom is faster, selecting features is faster, updating attributes on selected features is faster, and it consumes less memory. So don’t be afraid to put QGIS to the test.

1 – Trace digitising tool (2.14)

If you do lots of digitising, you better look into this new feaure that landed on QGIS 2.14. It allows you to digitize new feature by using other layers boundaries. Besides the quality improvement of layers topology, this can make digitizing almost feel pleasing and fast! Just click the first point, move your mouse around other features edged to pick up more vertex.

There were other new features that also made the delight of many users. For example, several improvements on the labeling, Georeference outputs (eg PDF) from composer (2.16), Filter legend by expression (2.14), 2.5D Renderer. Personally, the Style docker made my day/year. But you can check the full results of the survey, if you like.

Obviously, this list means nothing at all. All new features were of tremendous value, and will be useful for thousands (yes thousands) of people. It was a mere exercise as, with such a diverse QGIS crowd, it would be impossible to build a list that would fit us all. Besides, there were many great enhancements, introduced during 2016, that might have fallen under the radar for most users. Check the visual changelogs for a full list of new features.

On my behalf, to all developers, sponsors, and general QGIS contributors, once again

THANK YOU VERY MUCH FOR YOUR TREMENDOUS WORK!

I wish you a fantastic 2017.

The 6th QGIS UK user group meeting in Scotland is happening on the 3rd November 2016.  It is being hosted by the EDINA University of Edinburgh at the Informatics Forum and is sponsored by thinkWhere, Ordnance Survey, Angus Council and Cawdor Forestry.  Tickets are available through Eventbrite.

The almost final programme of presentations and lightning talks is as follows:

• Phil Taylor (CEH) – How deep is your loch?
• Fiona Hemsley-Flint – QGIS server
• University of Edinburgh – packaging and deploying QGIS
• Anouk Lang – Mapping narrative: QGIS in the humanities classroom
• Art Lembo (Salisbury University, MD) – terrain analysis with massively parallel processing techniques (embarrasingly so)
• Neil Benny (thinkWhere) – finding the heart of Scotland / viewshed analysis
• Tom Chadwin – qgis2web and coding a QGIS plugin
• Pete Wells (Lutra) – WMTS previews and XYZ support
• Stephen Bathgate – decision support system in Forestry
• Tim Manners (Ordnance Survey) – Creating an indoor routable network with QGIS and pgRouting
• Andrew Whitelee – QGIS in forestry/ecology
• Ross McDonald (Angus Council) – Them thar hills: shaded, textured and blended
• Michal Michalski (The Origins of Doha and Qatar Project) – DOHA: Doha Online Historical Atlas
• eeGeo – Using QGIS to create 3D indoor maps

Doors open from 9:00. Registration shortly thereafter. Start and welcome at 9:45 and a planned finish at 16:30. Geobeers to follow.

The 5th QGIS user group meeting in Scotland takes place next Wednesday at the University of Glasgow.  It is being hosted by the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences and has been generously sponsored by thinkWhere and Ordnance Survey.  You can find the draft programme of talks and presentations here: 5th-QGIS-user-group-programme

All tickets are now gone but get on the waitlist and you may be lucky.

See you all there!

(aka Features that ArcGIS Desktop users might not know that exists)

EN | PT

From time to time, I read articles comparing ArcGIS vs QGIS. Since many of those articles are created from an ArcGIS user point of view, they invariably lead to biased observations on QGIS lack of features. It’s time for a QGIS user perspective, so bare with me on this (a bit) long, totally and openly biased post.

“Hello, my name is Alexandre, and I have been using… QGIS“

This is something I would say at an anonymous QGIS user therapy group. I’m willing to attend one of those because being recently and temporally forced to use ArcGIS Desktop again (don’t ask!), I really really really miss QGIS in many ways.

There was a time when I have used ArcGIS on the regular basis. I used it until version 9.3.1 and then decided to move away (toward the light) into QGIS (1.7.4 I think). At that time, I missed some (or even many?) ArcGIS features, but I was willing to accept it in exchange for the freedom of the Open Source philosophy. Since then, a lot have happened in the QGIS world, and I have been watching it closely. I would expect the same have happened in ArcGIS side, but, as far I can see, it didn’t.

I’m using top shelf ArcGIS Desktop Advanced and I’m struggling to do very basic tasks that simply are nonexistent in ArcGIS. So here’s my short list of QGIS functionalities that I’m longing for. For those of you that use ArcGIS exclusively, some of this features may catch you by surprise.

Warning: For those of you that use ArcGIS exclusively, some of this features may catch you by surprise.

Transparency control

“ArcGIS have transparency! It’s in the Display tab, in the layer’s properties dialog!”

Yes, but… you can only set transparency at the layer level. That is, either it’s all transparent, or it’s not…

In QGIS on the other end, you can set transparency at layer level, feature/symbol level, and color level. You can say that this is being overrated, but check the differences in the following images.

Notice that in QGIS you can set transparency at color level everywhere (or almost everywhere) there is a color to select. This includes annotations (like the ones in the image above), labels and composers items. You can even set transparency in colors by using the RGBA function in an expression! How sweet can that be?

Blending modes

This is one of QGIS’s pristine jewels. The ability to combine layers the way you would do in almost any design/photo editing software. At layer or at feature level, you can control how they will “interact” with other layers or features below. Besides the normal mode, QGIS offers 12 other blending modes:  Lighten, Screen, Dodge, Darken, Multiply, Burn, Overlay, Soft light, Hard light, Difference, and Subtract. Check this page to know more about the math behind each one and this image for some examples

It’s not easy to grasp how can this be of any use for cartography before you try it yourself. I had the chance to play around while trying to answer this question.

A very common application for this functionality is when you want to add shadows to simulate the relief by putting a hill shade on top of other layers. In ArcGIS, you can only control the layer transparency, and the result is always a bit pale. But in QGIS, you can keep the strength of the original colors by using the multiply mode in the hill shade layer.

You can also use blending modes in the print composer items, allowing you to combine them with other items and textures. This gives you the opportunity to make more “artistic” things without the need to go post-processing in a design software.

Colour Picker Menu

Controlling color is a very important deal for a cartographer and QGIS allow you to control it like the professional you are. You can select your colours using many different interfaces. Interfaces that you might recognize from software like Inkscape, Photoshop, Gimp and others alike.

My favorite one is the color picker. Using color picker, you can pick colors from anywhere on your screen, either from QGIS itself or outside. This is quite handy and productive when you are trying to use a color from your map, it’s legend, a COLOURlovers palette or a company logo.

You can also copy/paste colors between dialogs, save and import color palettes, and you can even name a color and use it in a variable. With all this available for free, it’s hard to swallow Windows color selector :(.

Vector symbols renderers “powertools”

In ArcGIS, you have a few fancy ways to symbol your vector layers. You got: Single symbol, Unique values, Unique values many fields… and so on. At the first glance, you may think that QGIS lacks some of them. Believe me, it doesn’t! In fact, QGIS offers much more flexibility when you need to symbol your layers.

For starters, it allows you to use fields or expressions on any of the symbols renderers, while ArcGIS only allows the use of fields. Powered by hundreds of functions and the ability to create your owns in python, what you can do with the expression builder has no limits. This means, for instance, that you can combine, select, recalculate, normalize an infinite number of fields to create your own “values” (not to mention that you can tweak your values labels, making it ideal to create the legend).

And then, in QGIS, you have the special (and kinda very specific) renderers, that make you say “wooooh”. Like the Inverted polygons that allow you to fill the the outside of polygons (nice to mask other features), the Point displacement to show points that are too close to each others, and the Heatmap that will transform, ON-THE-FLY, all your points in a layer into a nice heatmap without the need to convert them to raster (and that will update as soon as you, or anyone else, edits the point features).

But I have left the best to the end. The “One rendered to Rule them all”, the Rule-based symbols. With the rule-based renderer, you can add several rules, group them in a tree structure, and set each one with a desired symbol. This gives QGIS users full control of their layer’s symbols, and, paired with expression builder and data-defined properties, opens the door to many wonderful applications.

Atlas

One of my favorite (and missed) features in QGIS is the Map Composer’s Atlas. I know that ArcGIS has its own “Atlas”, the Data Driven Pages, but frankly, it’s simply not the same.

I believe you know the basic functionally that both software allow. You create a map layout and choose a vector layer as coverage, and it will create an output panned or zoomed for each of the layer’s feature. You can also add some labels that will change according to the layers attributes.

But in QGIS, things go a little bit further…

Basically, you can use coverage layer’s attributes and geometry anywhere you can use an expression. And, in QGIS, expressions are everywhere. That way, most layers and map composer items properties can be controlled by a single coverage layer.

With the right configuration, while iterating over the atlas coverage features, you can,  choose what feature to show and what features to hide, change a theme color for your map, rotate and resize your page acording to the feature size, choose a specific logo to came along with your map, and much more. Once again, the sky is the limit.

So, if you pair Atlas it with QGIS data-defined properties, rule-based symbols and expressions, ArcGIS Data Driven Pages are no match. You don’t think so? Try to answer this question then.

Tip: If you really want to leverage your map production, using Spatialite or Postgis databases you can create the perfect atlas coverage layers from views that fit your needs. No data redundancy and they are always updated.

Label and Style dialogs

This one is more of a User Experience thing than an actual feature, but you won’t imagine how refreshing it is to have all Style and Labels options in two single dialogs (with several tabs, of course).

Using the symbol menu in ArcGIS makes me feel like if I’m in the Inception movie, at some point in time, I no longer know where the hell am I. For example, to apply a dashed outline in a fill symbol I needed to open 5 different dialogs, and then go back clicking OK, OK, OK, OK …

In QGIS, once in the properties menu, every setting is (almost) one click way. And you just need to press OK (or Apply ) once to see the result!

As an extra, you can copy/paste styles from one layer to another, making styling several layers even faster. And now you say:

“Don’t be silly! In ArcGIS you can import symbols from other layers too.”

Symbols? yes. Labels? No! And if you had lots of work setting your fancy labels, having to do the exact same/similar thing in another layer, it will make you wanna cry… I did.

(I think I will leave the multiple styles per layer vs data frames comparison for another time)

WFS

“Say what?!!”

Yup, that’s it, ArcGIS Desktop lacks support for WFS OGC standard unless you buy an extra extension: The Data Interoperability Extention.

In a GIS world that, more and more, is evolving towards Open Data, Open Standards and OGC Web Services, this reveals a very mercantile approach by ESRI. If I were an ESRI customer, I would feel outraged. <sarcasm>Or maybe not… maybe I would thank the opportunity to yet invest some more money in it’s really advanced features…<\sarcasm>

In QGIS, like everything else, WFS is absolutely free (as in freedom, not free beer). All you need to do is add the WFS server’s URL, and you can add all the layers you want, with the absolute sure that they are as updated as you can get.

Fortunately for ArcGIS users with a low budget, they can easily make a request for a layer using the internet browser :-P.

http://giswebservices.massgis.state.ma.us/geoserver/wfs?request=GetFeature&service=wfs&version=1.0.0&typename=massgis:GISDATA.TOWNS_POLY&outputformat=SHAPE-ZIP

Or they can simply use QGIS to download it. But, in both cases, be aware that the layers won’t update themselves by magic.

Expression builder

I have already mentioned the use of expressions several times, but for those of you that do not know the expression Builder, I though I end my post with one of my all time favourite features in QGIS.

I do not know enough of ArcGIS expression builder to really criticize it. But, AFAIK, you can use it to create labels and to populate a field using the field calculator. I know that there are many functions that you can use (I have used just a few) but they are not visible to the common user (you probably need to consult the ArcGIS Desktop Help to know them all). And you can create your own functions in VBScript, Python, and JsScript.

On QGIS side, like I said before, the Expression Builder can be used almost everywhere, and this makes it very convenient for many different purposes. In terms of functions, you have hundreds of functions right there in the builder’s dialog, with the corresponding syntax help, and some examples. You also have the fields and values like in ArcGIS, and you even have a “recent expressions” group for re-using recent expressions with no the need to remember prior expression.

Besides, you can create your own functions using Python (no VBScript or JsScript). For this purpose, you have a separate tab with a function editor. The editor have code highlighting and save your functions in your user area, making it available for later use (even for other QGIS sessions).

Conclusion

These are certainly not the only QGIS features that I miss, and they are probably not the most limiting ones (for instance, not being able to fully work with Spatialite and Postgis databases will make, for sure, my life miserable in the near future), but they were the ones I noticed right away when I (re)open ArcGIS for the first time.

I also feel that, based on the QGIS current development momentum, with each QGIS Changelog, the list will grow very fast. And although I haven’t tested ArcGIS Pro, I don’t think ESRI will be able to keep the pace.

“Are there things I still miss from ArcGIS?” Sure. I miss CMYK color support while exporting maps, for instance. But not as much as I miss QGIS now. Besides, I know that those will be addressed sooner or later.

In the end, I kinda enjoyed the opportunity to go back to ArcGIS, as it reinforced the way I think about QGIS. It’s all about freedom! Not only the freedom to use the software (that I was already aware) but also the freedom to control software itself and it’s outputs. Maintaining the users friendliness for new users, a lot have been done to make power users life easier, and they feel very pleased with it (at least I am).

All this being said, the winner is… QGIS!!

The End

(of a very biased post)