[QGIS-Developer] Does QGIS 3.0 have a search capability across all layers and all fields

[Nyall Dawson]

On 20 January 2018 at 04:11, Richard Duivenvoorde <rdmailings at duif.net> wrote:
> On 19-01-18 18:24, C Hamilton wrote:
>> When I created my "Search Layers" plugin that does a textual search
>> across all vector layers and all fields, I was led to believe that this
>> capability would be in QGIS 3.0 and so "Search Layers" was only
>> important for 2.x. The only problem is that I cannot seem to find this
>> type of capability. 3.0 certainly has powerful selection capabilities on
>> a single layer, but I can't find a function that works across all vector
>> layers.
>>
>> Is the capability there and I am just missing it? If so then it should
>> be easier to find and if not then I will convert "Search Layers" for
>> QGIS 3.0.
>
> Hi C,
>
> Is the 'locate'-field in the lower left corner not almost what you need?
> The so called Locator interface.
>
> It is at least possible to go through all fields/values for current
> layer, using 'f'.
> So loaded a world layer, you can search for The Netherlands by start to
> type: "f net"
>
> This interface is also relative easy to implement, see my experimental
> setup for a Geocoder for Nomatim/OSM and a national Geocoder:
> https://github.com/rduivenvoorde/pdoklocatorplugin
>
> So I think(!) that it would be easy to go all layers to search?
>

It is - I actually originally wrote the feature search this way, but
decided in practice that it wasn't a good idea so in the end
restricted it to just the active layer.

Issues I had were:
- good results tended to be flooded out with results from unwanted tables
- a single slow table source can hold up the results from wanted tables

Nyall