[Qgis-developer] Incremental rendering update

[Marco Hugentobler]

Dear qgis devs,

One of the things I miss most in the current qgis version is the incremental 
update of the map when it is rendering. So on a long train journay, I took 
some time to look how this can be restored with minimal changes to the 
sources and the architecture. The source tarball of my experiments can be 
downloaded at:
http://karlinapp.ethz.ch/qgis_incremental_update.tgz

This is just a 'proof of concept'. If other devs like the approach, I can make 
a branch with these changes and fix remaining bugs.

The principle is that QgsMapCanvas and QgsMapCanvasMap have two methods: One 
that triggers the map rendering and one that just updates the canvas with the 
rendered QImage.
The QgsMapLayers have a signal called 'repaint requested' that is connected 
with the signal 'refresh' of the map canvas. Emiting the 'repaint requested' 
signal calls the method that updates the canvas with the currently rendered 
image, so the maplayer may decide when an update is appropriate.

Zoom and pan actions on the canvas on the other hand trigger the method that 
invokes the rendering process.

I think that this way, it is also possible to have the possibility to stop the 
rendering progress if a huge dataset has been opened. And of course I have 
other ideas in mind like smart zooming or making tiled wms requests (similar 
to the way OpenLayers does it)...

What are your opinions about that? 

Best regards,
Marco

 
-- 
Dr. Marco Hugentobler
Institute of Cartography
ETH Zurich
Technical Advisor QGIS Project Steering Committee
marco.hugentobler at karto.baug.ethz.ch