[Qgis-user] postgis manager plugin feedback

[Martin Dobias]

Hi Ricardo

On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 4:28 PM, Ricardo Filipe Soares Garcia
da<ricardo.garcia.silva at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello list and Martin
> I've been trying out the postGIS Manager plugin. It's great! I would
> like to leave some of the problems I found/wishlist for improvement.
>
> PROBLEMS:
>
> - When I import a shapefile to my existing postgisDB the GUI doesn't
> refresh the table list. I have to close the plugin and reopen it to
> see my newly imported table.

I know, I should fix it :-)
As a workaround, you don't have to close and reopen the whole plugin,
just click again on the current database connection in menu, it will
reconnect and refresh the list.


> - I am not able to run some SQL commands in the SQL window. For example:
>
> CREATE TABLE formacoesmeridional AS
> SELECT ST_INTERSECTION(f.the_geom, b.the_geom) as the_geom,
> f.codlito, f.comp_lit, f.per_geol, f.designa, f.pgid
> FROM formacoeslitologicas f, bacias b
> WHERE ST_INTERSECTS(f.the_geom, b.the_geom) AND b.gid=1
>
> this won't work. Why is that? It also doesn't give me any error or
> warning as to why it failed. I'm pretty sure the SQL code is correct
> because I can run this query just fine when using pgAdminIII.

The problem is that the executed commands are not automatically
committed. So if you add a commit command, it will do what you need.
But probably it would be good to do commits automatically...


> WISHLIST:
>
> - It would be very nice if there was a button to carry out the task of
> manually updating the geometry_columns table. As you can see by my SQL
> example, I was creating some a  new table as a result of a spatial
> intersection between existing tables. This kind of operation forces me
> to manually update the geometry_columns table with the info from my
> new table. If this could be done with a button press in the postGIS
> Manager it would be sweet.

I have this feature in my mind for some time. So it will likely be
implemented someday :-)


> - It would be great if you and the author of the pgQuery plugin would
> join both plugins into one. The pgQuery plugin has some nice
> functionality like the ability to perform queries using multiple
> tables, a nice pane for postgis functions, the ability to save query
> templates for common tasks and also the aility to load the results of
> a query directly to the Qgis canvas.

I see that there currently several nice plugins that focus on
different aspects of PostGIS databases. Of course it would be great to
have all such functionality in one plugin. However joining several
pieces of software is often harder than it seems to users. I would
welcome patches for postgis manager from authors of other plugins that
would incorporate the functionality they've developed. But I don't
have that much time to step up and start integrating others' work to
postgis manager myself.

Regards
Martin