[Qgis-developer] tabbed monitors

[Sjur Kolberg]

Hello!

I'll throw in an idea for a practical use case, although I must admit that I am not currently a stable user of QGIS (or any other OS GIS).

We are developing a distributed hydrological model framework, which simulates spatio-temporal dynamic processes, usually with discharge from a set of subcatchments as the final target. This framework has just been decided to become an Open Source project, but is not yet established as such.

For each time step, the model simulates a large number of variables and states that would be interesting to monitor, almost like an animation, but as the simulation goes. It would be very useful in subjective model diagnostics to select some of these, and see the simultaneous development of i.e. precipitation, snow storage, soil water and runoff maps. It would be desirable to have some sort of connected zoom, ensuring that all the map windows show the same area.

I have not even started to implement such a map interface module, but the idea of doing this through an existing GIS program has been there for a long time. At the moment, the system offers no display of maps or time series graphs.

For sure the ease of handling many map windows separately and as a group will determine how well a GIS can serve as front end to the hydrological model framework. Tabbed monitors would go some of the way, even better would be multiple canvases or one multi-map canvas split in 4 or 6 sub-windows with connected zoom and updating capability.

Best regards,
Sjur K :-)





 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: qgis-developer-bounces at lists.osgeo.org 
> [mailto:qgis-developer-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of 
> Martin Dobias
> Sent: 22. januar 2010 10:49
> To: cavallini at faunalia.it
> Cc: qgis-developer
> Subject: Re: [Qgis-developer] tabbed monitors
> 
> On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 4:43 PM, Paolo Cavallini 
> <cavallini at faunalia.it> wrote:
> > Hi all.
> > Any news about the possible development of a tabbed, 
> multimap interface for qgis?
> > We've been talking about this in Vienna, but I did not see 
> an outcome of the discussions.
> > All the best, and many thanks.
> 
> IIRC it's not clear how the tabbed interface should behave. Some of
> the unanswered questions:
> - one project per QGIS or one project per tab? (the first option
> probably makes more sense)
> - what differences should be allowed among tabs: allow different layer
> sets, different layer visibility settings, different layer symbologies
> - or use tabs only with different extents with the same data?
> - how the legend will be affected? allow e.g. different active layer
> for each tab?
> - how the map tools should work? bound to one canvas or should they
> interact with multiple canvases?
> - how the plugins should behave? until now, there are only one map
> canvas that plugin use. With multiple canvases, should plugin work
> with just one canvas or with all canvases (tabs)?
> 
> There are probably some more unanswered questions, these are just the
> ones from the top of my head. Probably other devs will add more
> thoughts. Having answers would enable us to think about the
> architecture. I think we're currently missing some practical use cases
> how the users would like to use the tabbed interface.
> 
> Martin
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