[Qgis-developer] Geocoding plugin: a good case for merge

[Martin Dobias]

Hi all

On Thu, Jun 9, 2016 at 12:07 PM, Richard Duivenvoorde
<rdmailings at duif.net> wrote:
> What about something like that:
> - we creating a gui-widget/toolbar for a geocoding search
> - we create a python api for it (actually: implement a buttonless plugin
> which registres the geocoder, and registres some slot/signals and does
> (part of) implementation)
> - by installing this plugin(s) you registre one or more geocoders, AND
> the plugin author actually implements the calling/retrieving/parsing of
> the results. We can maybe do some general standards in core (or via
> gdal): like OGC-OpenLS interface, or OSM-based ones or so
> - the core-geocoder gui then can look like the search bar in Firefox

Richard's idea makes perfect sense to me - some sort of search
functionality has been done by various plugins and it is probably time
to offer a common way to do it with QGIS API.

And I would not limit ourselves to just geocoding - there are other
uses for that, e.g.:
- gazetteers - for example Discovery plugin [1]
- search in attributes of loaded layer(s)

The API implementation could also take care of things like on the fly
completion while user is still typing and running the queries in the
background, so the GUI is not blocked. So a search plugin would only
take care of processing search/geocoding/gazetteer query and response,
all the rest would be handled by QGIS.

We can start a QEP - if we have someone who volunteers to design and
implement that (I think QEPs should not end up as feature requests).

Cheers
Martin

[1] http://plugins.qgis.org/plugins/Discovery/