[Qgis-user] Reselect Features

[Michael Edward McNeil]

Thank you for your reply, Andrea. I'll be glad to describe the situation and what I'm doing.

I'm running Qgis 3.23.3 for Windows (Windows 11), which is the regular environment I'm now working Qgis in – though earlier I also tried 3.23.2 on MacOS (the latter of which – Qgis for MacOS – I now believe to be a less refined and less finished variety of Qgis, similar version number or no).

For my particular project at present (a map I'm preparing of Roman Britain), I'm adding rivers to the map – drawing data from a shapefile of the "waterways" (rivers, creeks, canals, ditches, etc.) of the island of Britain (containing something like 190,000 features!), distributed by the U.K. government.

The procedure I've found most convenient at present for doing so (excepting the interference of the problem being discussed) is to copy the original shapefile to the name of the desired river, load it as a layer, open its Attributes Table, turn on Editing, sort the table by name, select all features bearing the right river name, then (after selecting the Select Features by Area or Single Click tool) scan through the segments and features of the intended river: 1) deselecting the segments of a different river possessing the same name (there are many such in Britain), 2) deselecting side segments which incorrectly bear your intended river's name (also a lot), 3) selecting incorrectly named segments (e.g., NULL) that if omitted would introduce gaps in the line of the river, 4) adding to the selection creeks possessing a different name, and so forth. Finally, invert the selection, delete all the features one didn't select in the process above, then save.

It all works well – until the eventual moment when one's pressed shift or control key momentarily fails to register, the entire laboriously selected set of features clears back to just the last one touched – and I pull out even more of my remaining hair.

Nor does saving the layer every now and then in the middle of the process do any good – because what features are selected or not at that instant doesn't get remembered in the save file.

This is the moment when it would be exceedingly nice if one could just pull down Edit > Select > Reselect Features and thereby get back to the last previous selected set of features as they existed just prior to the last keystroke/click entered.

But that command appears to do nothing.

(Thanks again for your response!)

Best,
Michael McNeil


> On Nov 16, 2023, at 16:33, Andrea Giudiceandrea via QGIS-User <qgis-user at lists.osgeo.org> wrote:
> 
> 
>> 
>> Michael Edward McNeil memcneil02 at gmail.com
>> Thu Nov 16 16:04:37 PST 2023
> 
>> Why doesn't the Edit > Select > Reselect Features command work?
> 
> Hi Michael,
> it seems to me the command works as expected [1], at least using QGIS 3.28 on Windows.
> 
> May you provide a detailed list of steps that lead to such command to not work properly?
> 
> Best regards.
> 
> Andrea
> 
> [1] https://docs.qgis.org/3.28/en/docs/user_manual/introduction/general_tools.html#selecting-manually-on-the-map-canvas
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