[Qgis-developer] Clarifying access to non geographical datas

[Martin Dobias]

On Tue, Jul 10, 2012 at 2:29 PM, Nathan Woodrow <madmanwoo at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yeah I think having a show all files would be a good option.   My main
> goal for the dialog is to do a way with as much of the filesystem feel
> as possible (but not removing it completely) because IMO there is has
> always been this divide in GIS software with the file system on one
> side, which people are comfortable with and understand (to some
> extent); and then there is the "other stuff" like databases, web
> services which normally you have to access a different way which makes
> people uncomfortable. Why should we treat them differently?  This is
> my attempt to remove some of that feel. It borrows strongly from the
> QBrowser idea, in fact would be good implemented as a sub set of that.
>
> The key difference to the QBrowser is that the tree on the left is
> only the root nodes (connection nodes) not the layers like in the
> browser.  Clicking on a node, or parent node, would show all the
> layers in that source on the right. This means you are not scrolling
> up and down to load layers from different sources.  If I expand a
> folder with 100 layers in QBrowser I now can't see my other
> connections at a glance, but QBrowser and my dialog mockup serve a
> different purpose.

Right I think ultimately QBrowser should be the actual "open layer"
dialog (or with just minimal differences - e.g. with management of
layers)... when we were working on it we had this use case in mind.
QBrowser itself is just a small amount of code, everything else is in
the core and providers, so that the code can be reused. The browser
tree should have an internal option not to show layers, they would be
shown separately like in windows file manager.

The unified add layer dialog has some fundamental parts solved, though
there are still various tiny things that need attention - typically
various provider-specific options - whether to list non-spatial
tables, whether to list tables not in geometry_columns, what encoding
to use when opening shapefiles, how to specify style of wms layers,
how to present wms tilesets, how to set primary key for views and so
on...

Martin