[Qgis-developer] Sharing 1. symbology (styles) and 2. projects incl. data and styles (GSoC, relocator, QConsolidate)

[Stefan Keller]

Hi,

These are thoughts on sharing 1. a whole QGIS symbology and 2. a whole
QGIS project including symbology and data.

There's a promising current GSoC project, where users ("designers,
cartographers") can << share QGIS style files >> incl. styles (.qml),
symbols (.xml) and SVG markers. End users can download and add styles,
symbols or SVG markers (set of?). See
https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/QGIS_Sharing_Repository .

Use case A: What about sharing a symbology with dozens of layers still
without the data? So, this is about users ("style producers") who want
to << share a complete set QGIS styles >> which involves references to
several data layers. End users should be able to open a dataset (like
a vector/raster data from GeoPackage or a QGIS project), and then load
or exchange a "symbology set". This is often the case when data is
split into several regions or when end users capture data of same
schema.

I have no ideas yet to resolve this use case, except taking use case B
as a (rather unmaintainable, intermediate) solution.

Use case B: Users ("producers") want to easily << share a complete
QGIS project >> including data and symbology. Currently for producers,
it is necessary to: 1. Manually collect all required files into a
"project directory" including project file .qgs, data, svg markers,
color ramps (others?), 2. Edit QGIS project to adapt file paths, and
finally 3. zip the directory and send or publish it. End users would
unpack it and double click on the QGIS project file.

Possible approaches are the relocator and QConsolidate plugins
(possibly not maintained any more) and my "All-in-one Project"
(unfinished). And there's Pirmin's idea to put everything into a
GeoPackage file instead of a zip file.

=> Any comments or ideas?

:Stefan

P.S. For more issues on this like locally installed symbol fonts,
temporary/in-memory data layers, databases, secured web services, and
layer provider plugins) see my "All-in-one Project"
(http://giswiki.hsr.ch/All-in-one_Project_QGIS_Plugin).