[Qgis-developer] Auto increment field for shapefiles?

[Alex Mandel]

On 05/17/2014 07:07 AM, Andrea Peri wrote:
> The dbf spec has a type serial ?
> 
> I don't remenber , but not sure of this.
> 
It does but not in dbf IV which is what shapefiles use (from a little
online poking) only in later versions like dbf 7.

> If the dbf has not a serial type.
> 
> This enhance will mena to produce a new kind of shapfile
> readable only from QGIS.
> 
> I guess should be avoided to produce incompatible new formats.
> 
> Andrea.
> 
I think what's being proposed is that the QGIS project is the only thing
that tracks that's serial, in the dbf field definition would stay
Integer. Of course editing the file in another program can easily break it.

I'd rather see effort into making other formats 1st class to help move
people off of shapefiles. Note ArcGIS does now support Spatialite
http://blog.geomusings.com/2013/08/07/spatialite-and-arcgis-10-dot-2/
And we expect Geopackage adoption to follow in the next few years.

Course if this really bugs someone, by all means implement something
just don't break the compatibility of the files.

-Alex

> 
> 2014-05-17 11:02 GMT+02:00 Paolo Cavallini <cavallini at faunalia.it>:
> 
>> Il 17/05/2014 00:38, mmekuria ha scritto:
>>> I am not sure what you mean, Paulo. But there is already the Feature Id
>>> (Object Id in ArcGIS) in QgsFeature. Do you mean having that a mandatory
>>> field that gets populated every time a feature is created within a
>>> shapefile?
>>
>> Almost: I mean let the user define a field as SERIAL
>> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/datatype-numeric.html
>> also for non-database data types (especially shp).
>> It does not seem too difficult, now that we have a record number function
>> in the
>> expressions.
>> All the best.
>>
>> --
>> Paolo Cavallini - www.faunalia.eu
>> Corsi QGIS e PostGIS: http://www.faunalia.eu/training.html
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> 
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