[Qgis-developer] Support for field aliases in expressions

[Matthias Kuhn]

Hi,

I today was discussing the idea of support for column aliases in 
expressions. The use-case for this is that engineers using GIS in their 
language will be able to use the same field names that they are used to 
(but not in the common database which is english) to filter the 
attribute table etc.

For prepared execution this will not make any difference and the only 
problem I can think of apart from this is name collision, something we 
can prevent by not allowing duplicate aliases (or check and warn in the 
prepare function).

We could make it optional (in the API) and by default use expressions 
without alias support when used from python but enable it for the calls 
from core. But I am not sure this is required.

Opinions? Is there something I forgot?

Matthias