qgis2img is a new tool that I created, in a bit of friendly competition with the boss, which I lost but we will not speak of that again, for benchmarking QGIS layer rendering. The goal is simple. Take a project file(s), or QLR file(s), render the output, time the results, and dump a summary. Simples. The tool does 3 passes by default to get the average but can do more. It's nothing fancy. Written in Python so it can be evolved quickly.

qgis2img will render each image by itself to give single timings then it will render the whole project as you see in QGIS.

It uses QGIS 2.4 (qgis-dev) in order to use the new rendering methods. I don't have any plans to port it to work with QGIS 2.2, however feel free to send a pull request.

The usage is pretty simple:

usage: qgis2img [-h] [--size SIZE] [--passes PASSES] [--types TYPES] file

Benchmark QGIS project file and layer loading times

positional arguments:
  file             Project file to load into QGIS

optional arguments:
  -h, --help       show this help message and exit
  --size SIZE      Image output size
  --passes PASSES  Number of render passes per layer
  --types TYPES    What to render. Options are layer|project, layer, or project.
                   layer|project will render all layers as the if the project
                   is open in QGIS.

with the results:

$ python.exe qgis2img parcels.qgs --passes 5
Project Loaded with: [u'PARCEL_region - Shp', u'PARCEL_region - Spatialite']
Rendering images with 5 passes
Layer: PARCEL_region - Shp      4.907 sec
Layer: PARCEL_region - Spatialite       3.66 sec
Layer: Project     5.3378 sec

Easy.

It will generate an image for each layer and the project:

You can find the project at https://github.com/DMS-Aus/qgis2img

Pull requests and ideas welcome

qgisbench

There is a tool called qgisbench in the QGIS source tree that does this kind of thing too, however:

• It's in C++
• We don't ship it
• It's in C++
• <3 Python
• These things are good examples for others
• Using the Python API in this ways lets me see gaps

qgis2img is a new tool that I created, in a bit of friendly competition with the boss, which I lost but we will not speak of that again, for benchmarking QGIS layer rendering. The goal is simple. Take a project file(s), or QLR file(s), render the output, time the results, and dump a summary. Simples. The tool does 3 passes by default to get the average but can do more. It's nothing fancy. Written in Python so it can be evolved quickly.

qgis2img will render each image by itself to give single timings then it will render the whole project as you see in QGIS.

It uses QGIS 2.4 (qgis-dev) in order to use the new rendering methods. I don't have any plans to port it to work with QGIS 2.2, however feel free to send a pull request.

The usage is pretty simple:

usage: qgis2img [-h] [--size SIZE] [--passes PASSES] [--types TYPES] file

Benchmark QGIS project file and layer loading times

positional arguments:
  file             Project file to load into QGIS

optional arguments:
  -h, --help       show this help message and exit
  --size SIZE      Image output size
  --passes PASSES  Number of render passes per layer
  --types TYPES    What to render. Options are layer|project, layer, or project.
                   layer|project will render all layers as the if the project
                   is open in QGIS.

with the results:

$ python.exe qgis2img parcels.qgs --passes 5
Project Loaded with: [u'PARCEL_region - Shp', u'PARCEL_region - Spatialite']
Rendering images with 5 passes
Layer: PARCEL_region - Shp      4.907 sec
Layer: PARCEL_region - Spatialite       3.66 sec
Layer: Project     5.3378 sec

Easy.

It will generate an image for each layer and the project:

You can find the project at https://github.com/DMS-Aus/qgis2img

Pull requests and ideas welcome

qgisbench

There is a tool called qgisbench in the QGIS source tree that does this kind of thing too, however:

• It's in C++
• We don't ship it
• It's in C++
• <3 Python
• These things are good examples for others
• Using the Python API in this ways lets me see gaps

Nothing in life ever comes free. Each time you make a desision there can sometimes be long a lasting effect. This is exectly the case with the new QGIS 2.0 pyqgis API. Changing to the new api was a big step in order make the API clear and more Pythonic. But there was a small detail to fix.

In QGIS 2.0 we can now just do this to read the attribute value for a field:

>>> feature['yourcolumn']
"Hello World"

What would you expect to get if the value was NULL (not empty string). Would you expect to see None? You would think so. Right? However lets just check that.

>>> feature['yourcolumn']
NULL

NULL? What the heck? That isn't None! What is NULL?

>>> type(NULL)
<class 'PyQt4.QtCore.QPyNullVariant'>

QPyNullVariant WA! WHAAAT! Why didn't we get None? Turns out by removing QVariant from PyQt it had some impact on methods that expected a NULL QVariant - A QVariant with no value. Passing None didn't work because those methods needed the type information that QVariant holds, even when NULL.

When using SIP V2, which is what QGIS 2.0 is using, PyQt will auto convert any Null QVariants to QPyNullVariant.

The NULL you see is a variable masking the QPyNullVariant so that the output is nicer and it's easier to work with. We have also added a bunch of methods to QPyNullVariant in order to make it act as much like None as we can.

If you see a NULL this is how you can deal with it:

>>> feature['yourcolumn']
NULL

>>> if not feature['nullcolumn']:
>>>     print "Was null"
Was null

>>> if feature['nullcolumn'] == NULL:
>>> print "Was null"
Was null 

NULL will also return False if boolean checked:

>>> value = NULL
>>> if value:
... print "This value wasn't null"
... else:
...     print 'This value was null' 
This value was null

It will also be equal to any other NULL aka QPyNullVariant variable

>>> value = NULL
>>> value2 = NULL
>>> value == value2
True
>>> value = 100
>>> value2 = NULL
>>> value == value2
False 

Does None is NULL work? No.

One way to check if something is Null in Python is to use value is None however this will not work with our NULL type. Overloading the is operator in Python is not supported and there is no way we can support this - trust me I have tried. is is really doing id(object) == id(object) under the hood:

DO NOT do the following if you are checking for null values in pyqgis unless you know the return type is None:

>>> value = NULL
>>> value is None
false

Nothing in life ever comes free. Each time you make a desision there can sometimes be long a lasting effect. This is exectly the case with the new QGIS 2.0 pyqgis API. Changing to the new api was a big step in order make the API clear and more Pythonic. But there was a small detail to fix.

In QGIS 2.0 we can now just do this to read the attribute value for a field:

>>> feature['yourcolumn']
"Hello World"

What would you expect to get if the value was NULL (not empty string). Would you expect to see None? You would think so. Right? However lets just check that.

>>> feature['yourcolumn']
NULL

NULL? What the heck? That isn't None! What is NULL?

>>> type(NULL)
<class 'PyQt4.QtCore.QPyNullVariant'>

QPyNullVariant WA! WHAAAT! Why didn't we get None? Turns out by removing QVariant from PyQt it had some impact on methods that expected a NULL QVariant - A QVariant with no value. Passing None didn't work because those methods needed the type information that QVariant holds, even when NULL.

When using SIP V2, which is what QGIS 2.0 is using, PyQt will auto convert any Null QVariants to QPyNullVariant.

The NULL you see is a variable masking the QPyNullVariant so that the output is nicer and it's easier to work with. We have also added a bunch of methods to QPyNullVariant in order to make it act as much like None as we can.

If you see a NULL this is how you can deal with it:

>>> feature['yourcolumn']
NULL

>>> if not feature['nullcolumn']:
>>>     print "Was null"
Was null

>>> if feature['nullcolumn'] == NULL:
>>> print "Was null"
Was null 

NULL will also return False if boolean checked:

>>> value = NULL
>>> if value:
... print "This value wasn't null"
... else:
...     print 'This value was null' 
This value was null

It will also be equal to any other NULL aka QPyNullVariant variable

>>> value = NULL
>>> value2 = NULL
>>> value == value2
True
>>> value = 100
>>> value2 = NULL
>>> value == value2
False 

Does None is NULL work? No.

One way to check if something is Null in Python is to use value is None however this will not work with our NULL type. Overloading the is operator in Python is not supported and there is no way we can support this - trust me I have tried. is is really doing id(object) == id(object) under the hood:

DO NOT do the following if you are checking for null values in pyqgis unless you know the return type is None:

>>> value = NULL
>>> value is None
false