[Qgis-developer] A trip down memory lane - .avl style support in QGIS

[Tim Sutton]

Hi All

Over the next week or so I plan to work on adding support for
autoproperties of vector layers. If you ever used ArcView 3.x I'm
talking about a feature similar to .avl support. The idea is that for
supported vector layers when the layer (e;g; layerfoo.shp) is first
loaded, QGIS will look for an associated layerfoo.qml file and if it
exists and we are not loading a project file, the symbology and other
settings in the qml file will be applied to the layer as it is loaded.
The .qml format will be exactly the same as the xml serilised layer
properties.

I will add a couple of buttons to the layer properties box to allow
loading and saving symbologies. If the qml file basename matches, it
will be automatically loaded at layer load. If the name does not
match, the user will be able to load it using the load symbology
button. Doing it this way will let you store multiple persistent
symbology profiles, with one of them being default.


So the point of my email is to ask:

- is anyone else working on this same functionality - if so please let
me know so I don't duplicate effort.
- where shall I do this work? Advanced editing branch? I dont antipate
it will take a long time to complete and would like to merge it in to
trunk soon after 0.9.1 goes out.
- are there any special behaviours or considerations people would like
me to take into account while doing this work?
- Düster I believe you had also requested this feature from Gary at
the FOSS4GIS conference - is there anything that I've left out that
you were hoping for?

Note I will be out of contact till Sunday so apologies if my response
is not immediate.

Regards

-- 
Tim Sutton
QGIS Project Steering Committee Member - Release  Manager
Visit http://qgis.org for a great open source GIS
openModeller Desktop Developer
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niche modelling tool
Home Page: http://tim.linfiniti.com
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