QGIS turned 20 last year. Help us get ready for the next 20+ years by becoming a sustaining member!

We want to ensure another 20+ years of sustainable development to keep on bringing the most user-friendly GIS to users worldwide. 

This year (2023), we, therefore, plan to focus on addressing long-standing infrastructure debt (particularly docs and web infrastructure). To make this infrastructure more sustainable, we had to make the difficult decision to move funds from our annual grant program to rather support these infrastructure tasks. To enable us to bring the grant program back to full strength and to address upcoming challenges (including but not limited to Qt6 support and next-generation installers), we need additional funds. The best way to achieve this goal is to enlarge our sustaining member base. 

Our existing sustaining members contribute €130k per year. We are aiming to raise an additional €70k per year (equivalent to 1 new flagship, 3 new large, 4 new medium, and 8 new small sustaining memberships) to bring the total member contributions up to €200k.

The campaign to raise funds for our activities runs from 16th January 2023 until 16th February 2023. (Update: now extended to end of March 2023)

Our funding progress so far:

To keep the lights on, become a sustaining member or donor.

Details: Sustaining Membership Program Overview

Every contribution counts. 

If you need to convince your boss … 

Executive summary

QGIS is a high-impact, global project. QGIS.org provides open access to best-in-class tools for visualizing, creating, editing, analyzing, and publication of spatially linked data and information products. QGIS.org does not prescribe how these tools should be used, but we make these tools freely available and accessible to everyone in the hope of fostering a more just society, better making, and furthering the goal of a more sustainable environment. Our cross-platform software is available on traditional desktop PC’s, on mobile devices, and in the cloud.

Who uses QGIS?

QGIS is used by governments, large multi-national organizations, corporate entities, and academic institutions all the way down to small businesses and hobbyist users. Our Open Source development model makes the software accessible to all of these users at a cost they can afford, excluding no one from the ability to benefit from QGIS.

QGIS is free of cost, not cost-free

It has taken, and will continue to take, a great deal of effort to develop high-quality tools like those provided by QGIS.org. Initially, this cost was borne exclusively through the efforts of dedicated volunteers. As the project matured, a financial ecosystem developed around the project. Customers began to contract community members to extend the QGIS project (software, documentation, online infrastructure) to better serve their needs.

In parallel with these directed funding efforts, we developed programmes for supporting the project with funds that we can use at our own discretion via donations and sustaining memberships. These discretionary funds allow us to provide all of the supporting infrastructure around the project. In addition, it enables us to fund:

• Quality improvements to the software,
• Host contributor meetings,
• Hire technical contributors to improve broad-reach elements of the project, and
• Grow the community around the project to strengthen its long-term sustainability.

A value-for-value model

Many of our users migrate to QGIS from proprietary alternatives which are financially unsustainable to use within their organizations. We celebrate the fact that we are able to open doors that would have otherwise been closed for those needing spatial tools such as QGIS. However, we also ask you to share some of the value gains that you realize from moving to QGIS with us. The funds you provide to us are used to the direct benefit of all users, who get to enjoy a more feature-rich, stable, and well-documented set of QGIS tools. This ‘value-for-value’ model helps to ensure the long-term sustainability and prosperity of the QGIS project. With nearly half a million daily active users, your contributions can make a huge impact on the lives of many people. The project has received in-kind and financial contributions from many well-known international organizations around the world, whom we thank deeply. We invite you to join the ever-growing number of organizations that see value in the work we do and share value back to us in the form of financial contributions to support our work.

View our financial reports →

Governance

QGIS.org is registered as a Swiss Verein (Association) that is operated in a non-profit manner. It is managed by an elected board and contributed to by hundreds of people from around the world. In the same way that the software we develop is open source, the project is operated with the same principle of openness, with all financial reports, board reports, and community decisions carried out in an open and transparent way.

View our annual general reports →

We are happy to announce that our 25th Contributor Meeting will be held in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands from 20 to 23 April 2023.

uc2023.qgis.nl

Leading up to the contributor meeting, we will also have a two-day International QGIS User Conference, on 18 & 19 April.

QGIS Contributors Meetings are volunteer-driven events where contributors to the QGIS project from around the world get together in a common space – usually a university campus. During these events, contributors to the QGIS project take the opportunity to plan their work, hold face-to-face discussions and present new improvements to the QGIS project that they have been working on. Everybody attending the event donates their time to the project for the days of the event. As a project that is built primarily through online collaboration, these meetings provide a crucial ingredient to the future development of the QGIS project. The event is planned largely as an ‘unconference’ with minimal structured programme planning. We do this to allow attendees the freedom to meet dynamically with those they encounter at the event. Those sessions that are planned are advertised on the event web page and we try to enable remote participation through video conferencing software. Although our hosts are not funded and donate the working space to us, we show our appreciation by making one of our software release’s splash screens in honour of that host, which is a great way to gain exposure of your institution and country to the hundreds of thousands of users that make use of QGIS.

For more details and to sign up, please visit the corresponding wiki page.

The QGIS plugin repository currently lists 1752 plugins and the list keeps on growing. This month has been busy with 14 new plugins. It can be challenging to stay up to date.

Our monthly plugin update is meant to provide you a quick overview of the newest plugins. If any of the names or short descriptions piques your interest, you can find the direct link to the plugin page in the table below the screenshot.

December has been busy with two new MovingPandas releases: v0.13 and v0.14.

The latest v0.14 release is now available from conda-forge.

These releases are a huge step forward towards making MovingPandas easier to install with fewer mandatory dependencies. All interactive plotting libraries are now optional. So if you are using MovingPandas for trajectory data processing in the background and don’t need the interactive visualization features, the number of necessary libraries is now much lower. This (and the fact that GeoPandas is now shipped with OSGeo4W) will also make it easier to use MovingPandas in QGIS plugins.

New features:

• #268 New add_angular_difference method

Includes fixes and enhancements for:

• #267 Improved documentation: direction values are [0, 360)

Behind the scenes:

• #269 Fixed read the docs build
• #261 Made interactive plotting libraries optional
• #257 Fixed broken pre-commit
• Created a Mastodon account

As always, all tutorials are available from the movingpandas-examples repository and on MyBinder:

If you have questions about using MovingPandas or just want to discuss new ideas, you’re welcome to join our discussion forum.

Changes

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Fix a serious issue leading to corrupted graphics - such as missing combo box background colors - on old devices.

Listen to the latest developments in point clouds and QGIS from Martin Dobias: MapScaping podcast.

Martin Dobias, our CTO and the lead developer of 3D and point clouds integration in QGIS sat down with Daniel O’Donohue from Mapscaping to talk about point clouds and QGIS.

Martin discusses his early involvment with QGIS back in 2005 and how he started his journey to become a QGIS developer.

The QGIS plugin repository currently lists 1739 plugins and the list keeps on growing. This month has been busy with 12 new plugins. It can be challenging to stay up to date.

Our monthly plugin update is meant to provide you a quick overview of the newest plugins. If any of the names or short descriptions piques your interest, you can find the direct link to the plugin page in the table below the screenshot.

QField is a community-driven open-source project. It is free to share, use and modify and it will stay like that. The very essence of a community is to help and support each other. And that’s where YOU come into play. To make it work we need your support!

For those who don’t know much about the concept of open source projects, a bit of background. Investing in open-source projects is a technical and ethical decision for OPENGIS.ch. Open source is a technological advantage, as we receive input from many developers worldwide who are motivated to work out the best possible software. It prevents our customers from vendor lock-in and allows complete ownership and control of the developed software. And finally, not only financially independent businesses and people should benefit from professional software but also those who might not have the financial means to pay for features, and licences. 

You are not a developer, but you still like to use QField and support it? Good news. You don’t have to be a developer to use, contribute or recommend the app. There are plenty of things that need to be done to help QField to remain the powerful software it is right now and become even better. Here are a few suggestions on how you can give something back.

1. Review the app ★★★★★ in google’s play store or apple’s app store. 
2. Let the world know about it! It doesn’t matter if you’re on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram or any other social media platform. Show and tell about where QField helped you. We appreciate every post and we promise to like, share and comment.
3. Write about your experience and please let us know. Be it in your blog or as a new success story. Insights into field projects are extremely valuable. It helps us to make the app even more efficient for your work, and it helps others to understand the range of applications for QField.
4. Register for a paid QFieldCloud account. QFieldCloud allows to synchronize and merge the data collected in QField. QFieldCloud is hosted by the makers of QField and by getting an account you help QField too.

Do you want to do something that is more hands-on and directly linked to the app? No problem. 

4. Help with the documentation. You can document features, or improve the documentation in English. Read the how-to guide to get started.
5. And if you are multilingual you might consider translating the documentation or the app in your language.
6. Become a beta tester and be the first to report a bug! When something doesn’t work properly it might be a bug. The quicker we know about it, the faster it can be resolved.
7. You can ask and answer questions on gis.stackexchange and help others on the user discussions platform.
8. If you are a developer and you want to get involved in QField development, please refer to the individual documentation for QField, QFieldCloud and QFieldSync.

And now finally for those of you who have the financial means, you can either sponsor a feature or subscribe to one of the monthly sponsorships. By doing so you help get freshly baked QField versions straight to everyone’s devices.

Nothing in it for you? In that case, just drop by to say thank you or have a hot or cold beverage with us next time you meet OPENGIS.ch at a conference and you might make our day!
Want to know more about the idea of community-driven open-source projects and the QGIS project in particular? Check out Nyall Dawson’s blog post about how to effectively get things done in open source!

Changes

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Geometry editor rubberband fix (#3709)
• Keep the feature form model alive when hiding form to digitize child geometry (#3705)

Changes

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Fix field constraints not ignored when field hidden
• Fix freeze on old devices when clicking the layer tree (or toggling editing on)
• Fix UI elements overlapping with bottom OS system bar
• Fix iOS native camera / gallery failing when destination directory does not exist
• Fix handling of unique constraints when adding child features in a newly-created parent feature
• Fix clipping of QFieldCloud password text input
• Fix checkbox editor widget regression

This blog post is about QGIS relations and how they are edited in the attribute form with widgets in general, as well as some plugins that override the relations editor widget to improve usability and solve specific use cases. The start is quite basic. If you are already a relation hero, then jump directly to the plugins.

QGIS Relations in General

Let’s have a look at a simple example data model. We have four entities: Building, Apartment, Address and Owner. In UML it looks like this:

• A building can have none or multiple apartments, but an apartment must to be related to a building. This black box on the left describes the relation strength as a composition. An apartment cannot exist without a building. When a building is demolished, all apartments of it are demolished as well.
• An apartment needs to be owned by at least one owner. An owner can own none or more apartments. This is a many-to-many relation and this means, it will be normalized by adding a linking (join) table in between.
• A building can have an address (only one – no multiple entrances in this example). An address can refer to one building.
  Why not making one single table on a one-to-one relation? To ensure their existence independently: When a building is demolished, the address should persist until the new building is constructed.

Creating Relations in QGIS

In QGIS we have now five layers. The four entities and the linking table called “Apartment_Owner”.

Open Project > Properties… > Relations

With Discover Relations the possible relations are detected from the existing layers according to their foreign keys in the database. In this example no CASCADE is defined in the database what means that the relations strength is always “Association”.

Where would “Composition” make sense?

Of course in the relation “Apartment” to “Building”, to ensure that when a feature of “Building” is deleted, the children (“Apartment”) are deleted as well, because they cannot exist without a building. Also a duplication of a feature of “Building” would duplicate the children (“Apartment”) as well.

But as well on the linking (join) table “Apartment_Owner” and its relation to “Apartment” and “Owner” a composition would make sense. Because when a feature of “Apartment” or “Owner” is deleted, the entry in the linking table should be deleted as well. Because this connection does not exist anymore and otherwise this would lead to orphan entries in the linking table.

Walk through the widgets

To demonstrate the relation widgets Relation Editor, Relation Reference and Value Relation we make a walk through the digitizing process.

Relation Editor

First we create a “Building” and call it “Garden Tower”. Then we add some “Apartments”.

The “Apartments” are created in the widget called Relation Editor. This shows us a list (similar to the QGIS Attribute Table) of all children (“Apartment”) referencing to this “Building”. We have here activated the possibilities to add, delete and duplicate child-features.

In the widget settings (Right-click on the layer > Properties… > Attribute Form) we see that there are other possibilities to link and unlink child-features as well as zoom to the current child-feature (what only would make sense when they have a geometry).

As well we can set here the cardinality. This will become interesting when we go to the “Owner” to “Apartment” relation. But let’s first have a look at the opposite of what we just did.

Relation Reference

When we open now a feature of “Apartment”, we see that we have a drop down to select the “Building” to reference to.

On the right of this drop down we can see some buttons. Those are for the following functionalities (from left to right):

• Open the form of the current parent feature (in our case the “Building” feature called “Garden Tower”)
• Add a new feature on the parent layer (in our case “Building”)
• Highlight the parent layer (in our case “Building”) on the map
• Select the parent feature (in our case “Building”) on the map to reference it

In the settings (Right-click on the layer > Properties… > Attribute Form) we see that we choose the configured relation to connect the child (“Apartment”) to the parent (“Building”). This won’t be needed with the widget Value Relation.

Value Relation

The Value Relation does not require a relation at all. We simply choose the “parent” layer (“Building”) its primary key as the key (“t_id”) and a descriptive field as the value (“Description”).

The result shows us a drop down as well to select the parent.

It is much easier to configure, but you can see the limitations. There are no such functionalities to control the parent feature like add, identify on map etc. As well you need to be careful to fulfill the foreign key constraint (you have to choose the correct field to link with). All this is given, when you build a Relation Reference on an existing relation.

Many-to-Many Relations

Now we link some “Owner” to our “Apartment”. We could create new ones like we did it for the “Apartment” in “Building” or we can link existing ones. For linking we choose the yellow link-button on the top of the Relation Editor.

This dialog looks similar to the Relation Editor widget. You have just to select the “Owner” you want to link to the “Apartment” by checking the yellow box. It’s a very powerful tool, but people are often confused about the load of functionality here and the selection that can be difficult to get used to (yellow boxes vs. blue index selection). For this case we extended the Relation Editor widget with a plugin.

Anyway after that we linked our features of the layer “Owner”.

Have you seen the linking table in between? Well, me neither. It’s completely invisible for the end user. This because of the cardinality setting I mentioned already. When we choose the linked table “Owner” instead of “Many to one relation”, then we can create and link the other parent (“Owner”) directly.

One-to-One Relation

A one-to-one relation like we have here between “Building” and “Address” is created in the database more or less like a normal one-to-many relation. This means one of the tables (in our case “Address”) has a foreign key pointing to the parent table (“Building”). There are tricks to fulfill the one-to-one maximum cardinality (like e.g. by setting a UNIQUE constraint on this foreign key column) but still in the QGIS user interface it looks like a one-to-many relation. It’s displayed in a normal Relation Editor widget.

Solutions could be so called “Joins”. Go to the settings (Right-click on the layer > Properties… > Joins)

Here you can join a layer of your choice and add the fields of this other layer (in our case “Address”) to your current feature form (of “Building”). So it appears to the user that it’s the same table containing fields of “Building” and “Address”.

Negative point about those joins are, that they are fault prone. You have to be careful with default values (e.g. on primary keys) of the joined layer. You cannot expect a fully reliable feature form like you have it in the Relation Editor. Here as well, we extended the Relation Editor widget with a plugin.

Plugins for Relation Editor Widgets

Since QGIS 3.18 the base class of the Relation Editor Widgets became abstract, what opened the possibility to use it in PyQGIS and derive it to super nice widgets handling specific use cases and improving the usability.

Linking Relation Editor Widget

As mentioned before, the QGIS stock dialog to link children is full of features but it can be overwhelming and difficult to use. Mostly because of the two selection possibilities in the list. A blue selection is for the currently displayed feature, and a yellow checkbox selection is for the features to be actually linked.

In collaboration with the Model Baker Group we wanted to improve the situation. But as we where unsure how the end solution should look like, so we decided to experiment in a plugin. The result is a link manger dialog, in which features can be linked and unlinked by moving them left and right. The effective link is created or destroyed when the dialog is accepted.

Find more information on the repository https://github.com/opengisch/qgis-linking-relation-editor

Ordered Relation Editor Widget

Sometimes the order of the children play a role on the project, and you want to have them displayed following that. For that there is the Ordered Relation Editor Widget. You can configure a field in the children to be used to order them. In the given example the field Floor was used to order Apartments. Reordering the fields by Drag&Drop would change the value of the configured field. Display name and optionally a path to an icon to be shown on the list can be configured by expression in the Attribute Form tab in the layer properties (Right-click on the layer > Properties… > Attribute Form).

Document Management System Widgets

Often in QGIS projects there is the need to deal with external documents. This could be for example pictures, documentations or reports about some features. To support that we added two new tables in the project:

• Documents each document is represented by a row in this table. The table has following fields:
  • id
  • path is the filename of the document.
• DocumentsFeatures this is a linking (join) table and permits to link a document with one or more features in more layers. The table has following fields:
  • id
  • document_id id of the document.
  • feature_id id of the feature.
  • feature_layer layer of the feature.

Thanks to a QGIS feature named Polymorphic Relations we can link a document with features of multiple layers. The polymorphic relation can evaluate an expression to decide in which table will be the feature to link. Here a screenshot of the relation configuration:

After this configuration in the layers “Apartment” and “Building” it will be possible to link children from the “Documents” table. The document management plugin provides two widgets to simplify the handling of the relation. In the feature side widget the documents are displayed as a grid or list. If possible a preview of the contend is shown and you can add new documents via Drag&Drop from the system file manager. Double-click on a document will open it in the default system viewer.

The second widget is meant to be used in the Feature Form of the “Documents” table, and it permits to handy see, for each document, with which feature from which layer it is linked.

Find more information on the repository https://github.com/opengisch/qgis-document-management-system-plugin

That’s it

Well then. We hope that all the beginners reading this article received some light on QGIS Relations and all the advanced user some inspiration on the immense possibilities you have with QGIS ?

The QGIS 3.28 release is an extremely exciting release for all users who work in mixed software workplaces, or who need to work alongside users of ESRI software. In this post we’ll be giving an overview of all the new tools and features introduced in 3.28 which together result in a dramatic improvement in the workflows and capabilities in working with ESRI based formats and services. Read on for the full details…!

Before we begin, we’d like to credit the following organisations for helping fund these developments in QGIS 3.28:

• Naturstyrelsen, Denmark
• Provincie Gelderland, Netherlands
• Uppsala Universitet, Department of Archaeology and Ancient History
• Gemeente Amsterdam
• Provincie Zuid-Holland, Netherlands

FileGeodatabase (GDB) related improvements

The headline item here is that QGIS 3.28 introduces support for editing, managing and creating ESRI FileGeodatabases out of the box! While older QGIS releases offered some limited support for editing FileGeodatabase layers, this required the manual installation of a closed source ESRI SDK driver… which unfortunately resulted in other regressions in working with FileGeodatabases (such as poor layer loading speed and random crashes). Now, thanks to an incredible reverse engineering effort by the GDAL team, the open-source driver for FileGeodatabases offers full support for editing these datasets! This means all QGIS users have out-of-the-box access to a fully functional, high-performance read AND write GDB driver, no further action or trade-offs required.

Operations supported by the GDAL open source driver include:

• Editing existing features, with full support for editing attributes and curved, 3D and measure-value geometries
• Creating new features
• Deleting features
• Creating, adding and modifying attributes in an existing layer
• Full support for reading and updating spatial indexes
• Creating new indexes on attributes
• “Repacking” layers, to reduce their size and improve performance
• Creating new layers in an existing FileGeodatabase
• Removing layers from FileGeodatabases
• Creating completely new, empty FileGeodatabases
• Creating and managing field domains

On the QGIS side, the improvements to the GDAL driver meant that we could easily expose feature editing support for FileGeodatabase layers for all QGIS users. While this is a huge step forward, especially for users in mixed software workplaces, we weren’t happy to rest there when we  had the opportunity to further improve GDB support within QGIS!

So in QGIS 3.28 we also introduced the following new functionality when working with FileGeodatabases:

FileGeodatabase management tools

QGIS 3.28 introduces a whole range of GUI based tools for managing FileGeodatabases. To create a brand new FileGeodatabase, you can now right click on a directory from the QGIS Browser panel and select New – ESRI FileGeodatabase:

After creating your new database, a right click on its entry will show a bunch of available options for managing the database. These include options for creating new tables, running arbitrary SQL commands, and database-level operations such as compacting the database:

You’re also able to directly import existing data into a FileGeodatabase by simply dragging and dropping layers onto the database!

Expanding out the GDB item will show a list of layers present in the database, and present options for managing the fields in those layers. Alongside field creation, you can also remove and rename existing fields.

Field domain handling

QGIS 3.28 also introduces a range of GUI tools for working with field domains inside FileGeodatabases. (GeoPackage users also share in the love here — these same tools are all available for working with field domains inside this standard format too!) Just right click on an existing FileGeodatabase (or GeoPackage) and select the “New Field Domain” option. Depending on the database format, you’ll be presented with a list of matching field domain types:

Once again, you’ll be guided through a user-friendly dialog allowing you to create your desired field domain!

After field domains have been created, they can be assigned to fields in the database by right-clicking on the field name and selecting “Set Field Domain”:

Field domains can also be viewed and managed by expanding out the “Field domains” option for each database.

Relationship discovery

Another exciting addition in QGIS 3.28 (and the underlying GDAL 3.6 release) is support for discovering database relationships in FileGeodatabases! (Once again, GeoPackage users also benefit from this, as we’ve implemented full support for GeoPackage relationships via the “Related Tables Extension“).

Expanding out a database containing any relationships will show a list of all discovered relationships:

(You can view the full description and details for any of these relationships by opening the QGIS Browser “Properties” panel).

Whenever QGIS 3.28 discovers relationships in the database, these related tables will automatically be added to your project whenever any of the layers which participate in the relationship are opened. This means that users get the full experience as designed for these databases without any manual configuration, and the relationships will “just work”!

Dataset Grouping

Lastly, we’ve improved the way layers from FileGeodatabases are shown in QGIS, so that layers are now grouped according to their original dataset groupings from the database structure:

Edit ArcGIS Online / Feature Service layers

While QGIS has had read-only support for viewing and working with the data in ArcGIS Online (AGOL) vector layers and ArcGIS Server “feature service” layers for many years, we’ve added support for editing these layers in QGIS 3.28. This allows you to take advantage of all of QGIS’ easy to use, powerful editing tools and directly edit the content in these layers from within your QGIS projects! You can freely create new features, delete features, and modify the shape and attributes of existing features (assuming that your user account on the ArcGIS service has these edit permissions granted, of course). This is an exciting addition for anyone who has to work often with content in ArcGIS services, and would prefer to directly manipulate these layers from within QGIS instead of the limited editing tools available on the AGOL/Portal platforms themselves.

This new functionality will be available immediately to users upon upgrading to QGIS 3.28 — any users who have been granted edit capabilities for the layers will see that the QGIS edit tools are all enabled and ready for use without any further configuration on the QGIS client side.

Filtering Feature Service layers

We’ve also had the opportunity to introduce filter/query support for Feature Service layers in QGIS 3.28. This is a huge performance improvement for users who need to work with a subset of a features from a large Feature Service layer. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the Feature Service protocol, these layers can often be slow to load and navigate on a client side. By setting a SQL filter to limit the features retrieved from the service the performance can be dramatically increased, as only matching features will ever be requested from the backend server. You can use any SQL query which conforms to the subset of SQL understood by ArcGIS servers (see the Feature Service documentation for examples of supported SQL queries).

What’s next?

While QGIS 3.28 is an extremely exciting release for any users who need to work alongside ESRI software, we aren’t content to rest here! The exciting news is that in QGIS 3.30 we’ll be introducing a GUI driven approach allowing users to create new relationships in their FileGeodatabase (and GeoPackage!) databases.

At North Road we’re always continuing to improve the cross-vendor experience for both ESRI and open-source users through our continued work on the QGIS desktop application and our SLYR conversion suite. If you’d like to chat to us about how we can help your workplace transition from a fully ESRI stack to a mixed or fully open-source stack, just contact us to discuss your needs.

Changes

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Fix regression with QML and HTML containers not displaying in feature forms
• Fix initial extent when opening individual datasets with single-point (or multiple points at same location)

In the previous post, we — creatively ;-) — used MobilityDB to visualize stationary IOT sensor measurements.

This post covers the more obvious use case of visualizing trajectories. Thus bringing together the MobilityDB trajectories created in Detecting close encounters using MobilityDB 1.0 and visualization using Temporal Controller.

Like in the previous post, the valueAtTimestamp function does the heavy lifting. This time, we also apply it to the geometry time series column called trip:

SELECT mmsi,
    valueAtTimestamp(trip, '2017-05-07 08:55:40') geom,
    valueAtTimestamp(SOG, '2017-05-07 08:55:40') SOG
FROM "public"."ships"

Using this SQL query, we again set up a — not yet Temporal Controller-controlled — QueryLayer.

To configure Temporal Controller to update the timestamp in our SQL query, we again need to run the Python script from the previous post.

With this done, we are all set up to animate and explore the movement patterns in our dataset:

This post is part of a series. Read more about movement data in GIS.

Changes

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Fix Bluetooth scanning on devices running Android >= 12
• Fix multi-line text editor widget
• Fix wrong magnetic variation value with internal GNSS devices

The latest v0.12 release is now available from conda-forge.

This release contains some really cool new features, including:

• New function to add an acceleration column #253
• We have further improved our repo setup by adding an action that automatically creates and publishes packages from releases, heavily inspired by the work of the GeoPandas team.
• Last but not least, we’ve created a Twitter account for the project. (And might soon add a Mastodon account as well.)

As always, all tutorials are available from the movingpandas-examples repository and on MyBinder:

If you have questions about using MovingPandas or just want to discuss new ideas, you’re welcome to join our discussion forum.

Our ninjas have been so busy that less than a month after we released QField 2.4, we find ourselves with so many new features we simply can’t wait any longer to present to you the latest version of QField: 2.5 “Fancy Flamingo ?”.

Exciting new features

QField’s main new feature of this 2.5 release cycle is its brand new elevation profiling functionality which has been added to the measuring tool. Users are now able to dynamically build and analyze elevation profiles wherever they are – in the field or on their desktop – by simply drawing paths onto their maps and projects.

This is a great example of QField’s capability at bringing the power of QGIS through a UI that keeps things simple and avoids being in your way until you need it. Oh and while we’re speaking of the measuring tool, check out the new azimuth measurement!

This new version also brings multi-column support to feature forms. QField now respects the number of columns set by users in the attributes’ drag and drop designer while building and tweaking projects in QGIS. The implementation will take into account the screen availability and on narrow devices will revert to a one-column setup. Pro tip: try to change the background color of your individual groups to ease understanding of the overall feature form.

Another highlight of this release is a brand new screen lock action that can be triggered through QField’s main menu found in the side dashboard or in the map canvas menu shown when long pressing on the map itself. Once activated, QField will become unresponsive to touch and mouse events while keeping the display turned on. When locked, QField also hides tool buttons which results in a more complete view of the map extent.

Stability improvements

As with every release, our ninjas have been spending time hunting nasty bugs and improving stability and QField 2.5 is no exception. In particular, the feature form should feel more reliable and even more polished.

Changes

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Feature form fixes and optimizations
• Nicer in-app QFieldCloud registration process

🐛 Bug fixes

• Fix occasional crash when activating the measuring tool
• Further feature form stability fixes

With the recent changes to the Mergin Maps plugin for QGIS, you can visualise the local changes before synchronising your data.

Have you ever been in the situation when, after making a lot of changes in your Mergin Maps project, you hesitate to press Sync button because you are not sure that all required changes are made or afraid that some unwanted edits were introduced? Or maybe you need to review the work done and see what actually have changed between two versions? If the answer to any of these questions is “yes” then you will like the changes visualisation functionality we introduced in the 2022.4 version of the Mergin Maps plugin for QGIS.

Changes visualisation functionality comes handy in two use-cases: revising local changes made in the Mergin Maps project before syncing them with the server and getting a list of changes between two versions of the project. Let’s take a closer look at this feature.

Local changes visualisation

While working with Mergin Maps project, the user can at any time revise their current changes made locally. First, make sure that all your layer’s edits are saved (committed) as currently viewing of the unsaved changes is not supported. Then right-click on any vector layer and select “Show Local Changes” entry in the context menu.

Accessing local changes from context menu

This will open the Changes Viewer dialog. Each vector layer with local changes has its own tab in the Changes Viewer dialog, the name of the tab matches the layer name and also contains information about the number of changes in this specific layer. Local changes are shown on the map and in the tabular form, to distinguish different types of edits a following color codes are used: inserts (new features) are green, edits orange and deletions red. It is possible to enlarge or reduce the size of the map and table by dragging the splitter between them, splitter position is applied to all tabs and will be saved and reused on the further dialog calls.

Features added, deleted and modified in map and tabular views

Map canvas in the Changes Viewer dialog supports basic operations like panning as well as zooming in and out. By default, all project layers are shown on the map to provide better context, but it is possible to toggle their visibility by unchecking the “Toggle Project Layers” button in the toolbar above the map. When this button is unchecked, only changes from the current vector layer are shown.

If, after some panning/zooming, you need to return to the extent where all changes are visible — press “Zoom Full” button. Also, it is possible to select a specific feature(s) in the table below map and zoom to them by clicking the “Zoom To Selection” button. Finally, changes can be added as a new memory layer to the current project. To do so, click “Add to project” button and choose one of the options: add changes from the current layer or add all changes from all layers. For each changed layer, a new memory layer will be added to the current project. These changes layers will preserve the same color coding for features and attribute table as used in the Changes Viewer dialog. Please note, that these layers should be manually removed from the project before the sync, unless it is your intention to make them a part of your Mergin Maps project. Another way to revise local changes is to open Changes Viewer from the Project Status dialog by clicking “View Changes” button.

Mergin Maps Processing tools

Sometimes one may want to export local changes as a vector layer and save that file for further usage. Of course, this can be done with the help of Changes Viewer dialog, but it is time-consuming, especially when the Mergin Maps project has many layers or if there is a need to check local changes in several projects. To cover this use-case, we also provide “Extract local changes” tool. This tool is a part of the Mergin Maps QGIS plugin and can be found under the “Mergin Maps” group in the Processing Toolbox.

Mergin Maps Processing tools to create changeset

In the tool dialog you need to specify a directory with your Mergin Maps project, select a layer of interest either choosing from available layer or selecting a GeoPackage file in the project directory and layer in this file.

Processing tool to extract local changes

An output layer containing local changes will be created as a temporary or regular layer and added to the current project. This layer will have the same styling (both for features and attribute table) as the layers produced by Changes Viewer dialog.

Result of the local change processing tool

The “Create diff” tool comes handy when you need to revise the changes between two versions of the layer in the Mergin Maps project. This tool is also a part of the Mergin Maps QGIS plugin, and it is implemented as a Processing algorithm. The “Create diff” tool can be found under the “Mergin Maps” group in the Processing Toolbox.

The tool dialog is quite similar to the “Extract local changes” tool dialog. Fill in input values: directory of your Mergin Maps project, layer of interest, start and end version numbers. Finally, specify location of the output vector layer or leave the field empty if you want it as a temporary layer in your current project. After clicking “Run” the tool will query the server for information and generate a vector layer containing all changes made between specified layer versions. For example, if some field value was changed in one version and then the same field was changed again in another version, then only the last change will be shown in the output changes file.

This feature is an another step in our ongoing efforts to create an easy-to-use tool for collaborative data collection and data management. If you need help or want to share your experience with Mergin Maps QGIS plugin, please join us in the community chatroom, and we will be happy to hear your thoughts.