[Qgis-developer] tabbed monitors

[Martin Dobias]

2010/1/22 Sjur Kolberg <Sjur.A.Kolberg at sintef.no>:
> 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.

Hi Sjur

creation of such a frontend should be easy with QGIS libraries with
any recent QGIS version (>= 1.0) either using C++ or Python. I believe
the best approach for you would be to create a standalone application
with several map canvas widgets that would share the current extent
and update regularly.

Regards
Martin