[Qgis-developer] Processing NG/V2 - brainstorming

[Victor Olaya]

Hi, sorry for the late reply. Comments inline


>
> I've recently been informally chatting about possible enhancements to
> processing with a few QGIS team members, and I thought it'd be worth
> starting a public brainstorm about these ideas.

Great to see people thinking about how to improve Processing...this is
really cool :-)

> 1. Rework native algorithms to avoid layer input/outputs
>


I like the idea very much, but not sure how that might integrate in
the modeler. An algorithm is now run only when the dependencies are
already run, which means that the buffer ones should have generated
all the buffered features (and if no file is involved, stored them in
memory) before the intersection can be run. The "streaming" approach
you propose is much better, but it wont work with the current modeler
approach. Not that it cannot work like that, but we might need to
rewrite some parts of the modeler, and it wont be a matter of changing
the input/output classes or reworking the GeoAlgorithm class itself.


> 3. Porting components of processing to core
>
> There's demand (from eg QField) to reuse parts of processing outside of PyQGIS.
>
> I think good candidates for porting to core would be:
> - parameters
> - inputs
> - the algorithm base class
>
> In addition to allowing use outside of python this would also help
> strengthen these components by the static typing which would result of
> porting to c++.
>
> I'd also like to see the results + history dialogs merged and moved to
> core so that they can also be reused for non-processing tasks (eg
> composer exports).

I agree with all that. Especially the results and history dialogs,
which definitely need some love in terms of UI. There are other
elements in QGIS now that have a history, so it would be nice to store
all that in a single place. It might also give some more exposure to
the Processing history itself, which is an useful tool to learn how to
use Processing from the console or to repeat previous tasks just by
double clicking on the algorithm entry, but not many people use.


I will be happy to help with all this, so please add me to any
conversation you have around these topics.

Thanks a lot for all these ideas!