[Qgis-developer] Inconsistent usage of field aliases

[Spencer Gardner]

I recently worked with a map where another user had defined aliases on a
couple of fields. While trying to build expressions in the field calculator
and other contexts I became confused because the alias names that I saw in
the attribute table were not available in the expression builder. After
some searching (and panic over the thought that the shapefile was
corrupted) I realized that the expression builder refers to fields by their
actual name without any reference to the alias. Since I wasn't aware that
aliases had been set it didn't occur to me to check there.

It is highly confusing to use column aliases in some contexts and actual
names in other contexts. To improve user experience this should be unified.
There was a mailing list conversation in 2014
<https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/qgis-developer/2014-September/034551.html>
about this issue but as far as I can tell nothing was done about it.

There seem to be good arguments for using actual names and for using
aliases so I think the best solution will need to accommodate both usage
patterns. What is clear is that using aliases in some contexts and not in
others is not an intuitive design.

Has this been discussed more recently than my 2014 reference? If not, the
API changes to 3.0 might be a good opportunity to tackle this usability
issue.

Regards,
Spencer Gardner
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