[QGIS-Developer] Improving usability of "Project Home" in browser?

[Nyall Dawson]

Hey all,

I'm seeking ideas on how we can improve the usefulness of the "Project
Home" item in the browser panel.

Currently, this item is shown after opening a project, and consists of
a directory item showing the contents of the same folder in which the
.qgs project file is stored.

I really like the idea of this Project Home item, but I can't make use
of it because at none of my current workplaces are the .qgs project
files stored in the root directory of a project. A more common
structure is something like:

project_001\
project_001\incoming_data\
project_001\reports
project_001\outgoing
project_001\data
project_001\projects\my_qgis_file.qgs

In this case the shortcut to the .qgs folder doesn't help - because
none of the interesting stuff is located there. I suspect this isn't
an uncommon scenario, and that a lot of workplaces don't store .qgs
files in the root directory of projects.

Has anyone got any ideas of how we could improve the Project Home item
to meet this scenario? Best I can come up with is to add a new setting
(booo) in Project Properties to manually set the project home
folder...

(Note - In an ideal world, ALL file open/save dialogs would have a
shortcut to this project home folder available too. It's possible in
Windows (see e.g.
http://www.pbjzone.com/images/VS2010_open_dialog.png) - but not
exposed via Qt (yet) )

Nyall