[Qgis-developer] tabbed monitors

[Alex Mandel]

Martin Dobias wrote:
> 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

Hmm, I think I might have a different use case scenario in mind when I
think about a tabbed interface, where each tab could have the
same/similar layers but at different extents/zooms. Or each tab could be
completely different with the idea that each tab equals a component of a
final map composition.

(Arc calls these Data Frames I believe for those who might be familiar.)

Just some ideas,
Alex