[Qgis-developer] storing and reading WKT geom in non spatial Datasource

[Régis Haubourg]

Yes VRT is a good point, 
but it behaves like another datasource, so geomatic guys will know it, but
common user won't. 
I think having a transparent provider, detecting, reading and writing WKT
could be a solution. 

Real life example: 

 - an external enterprise has developped a whole Access DB + VBA macors +
forms for my administration. They come to see my at the end of the project,
"we would like to map querys results, but we would like to change the data
on the fly with the macros... and regenerate the maps.. ". 
      > Mapinfo answer... "possible but dangerous, and we're dropping MI,
just forget"
      > QGIS answer.. "ouch... export all in shp, ah no, your field names
will be truncated, use excel.. ah, clean it up well, no encoding nowhere,
.xls 2003, then import, join to your layer, export again in shp (1.8
limitations)... and... CSV could be nice in fact.. NO, access can't export
correctly carriage returns, damn! , so ODBC .. Oh no, my sys admin have cut
it off for security reasons, $^*ùù!! ".. So I say, "Why didn't you come at
start, we would have been working in spatialite environnement..." and no map
If I'm not free for the work or a good old FME day..  BAD.
     I dream I could answer: "OK, let's add just a new attribute layer with
WKT field, and makes queries, the open those table in QGIS, check "detect
spatial WKT column", and I have very slow but dynamic maps. 
I Know spatial index in extremely important, but that would always be better
than actual workflow.

On a technical point of view, maybe we could lay on VRT GDAL format.. but my
concern is to let common user have a simple and clear tool, with no XML
input needed. 
Thoughts?


 



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