[Qgis-developer] morph delimited-text-provider to generic table-provider?

[Richard Duivenvoorde]

On 2016-07-11 10:43, Nyall Dawson wrote:
> I still wonder if (in the ideal world) the delimited text provider be
> retired and all the extra features it has (wkt, regex, etc) ported
> over to OGRs csv reader. Then the provider would become just a user
> friendly front end for configuring the OGR data source. Benefits would
> be less code for us to maintain + write support, plus other projects
> could also take advantage of these features.
> 
> Disadvantages? It'd take a bunch of work :p

While I agree that the OGR-data dialogs could have a make-over, I think 
the point we want to make is missed in this way: create layer from 
whatever table is already loaded in QGIS (via whatever provider). 
Matthias is also right: you can probably do that via Generators (to be 
fixed first) or Virtual Layers... but I just tried and I could not 
easily figure out how to do this having loaded the an excel with the 
following columns:
name,x,y
a,0,0
b,10,10
c,20,20
d,30,30
Off course making the ui for this more user-friendly is maybe the best 
option.

Doing this via a plugin like Chris proposes is also possible but to us 
that looks like reimplementing the TD-gui again....

Regards,

Richard