[Qgis-developer] working with temporal data

[Václav Řehák]

Dne 4. srpna 2010 22:10 Giovanni Manghi <giovanni.manghi at gmail.com> napsal(a):
> Hi,
>
>>  Talking about
>> temporal data, is there any reason why there is no support for
>> datetime attributes in QGIS, only numbers and strings? In our study we
>> need to create point features for locations where an animal was
>> observed and the filter those features based on date and time.
> I believe it does not depend on the program but on the datasource. If
> you are using shapefiles you are limited to numer and strings. Take a
> far more advanced database like postgis and you'll have plenty of
> datatypes, including date/time.

There is a forum post (http://forum.qgis.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=6732)
claiming that shapefile attributes being just a DBF records might be
usable for datetime. So I wonder if this is a limitation of QGIS or
the shapefile format (or a specific version of the format).

Sure, I can use postgis and write SQL filters to filter by time but I
need a user-friendly way of creating new layers (either shapefile,
SQLite or PostGIS; just any format) with datetime attributes from
QGIS, either manually or from a plugin. The only workaround I found is
to tell my users to create the layers with attributes as text and then
convert it for them to Postgres datetime so they can filter using the
time. But this is barely acceptable for regular usage.

Vaclav