[QGIS-Developer] QGIS 3 vertex editor problems

[Martin Dobias]

Hi Andreas

On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 10:00 AM, Andreas Neumann <a.neumann at carto.net> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> In QGIS 3 the node editing on canvas was quite improved (thanks Martin and
> the sponsors!), however, the vertex editor that allowed to edit individual
> nodes in a list of exact coordinates suffered a lot.
>
> See https://issues.qgis.org/issues/17243
>
> Could a developer, during feature freeze, give the vertex editor some
> attention and fix the open issues?

Yeah I would happy to look into it. The issue is that as soon as node
tool was freed from the requirement of dealing with just one feature
at a time, there is not necessarily 1:1 relationship between what is
active in node tool and the vertex editor. This made me think whether
it would not be more useful to have a separation between node tool and
the vertex editor table. E.g. the vertex editor could be a standalone
dock widget with its own map tool to pick active feature. This could
probably solve all the issues listed in the bug above. I am not sure
what are the common use cases of the vertex editor - do people
commonly use numeric input of vertex coordinates together with visual
editing or are they barely used at the same time? Maybe Andreas if you
could describe your use case for vertex editor, that would help me
understand the workflow.


> I know that one can also use the advanced digitizin panel to edit vertices -
> but to be honest, this panel is so confusing to me - and probably to 90 % of
> the users out there as well - so I think the separate vertex editor panel
> still makes sense.

It is a bit difficult to grasp at first, but it is quite powerful -
maybe some tutorial videos would help to get people on board...


> For 3.2 I would even suggest to add new features to the vertex editor panel,
> to allow adding new features or add/delete individual coordinates of
> existing features, e.g. add new points at a given position, or delete one or
> more nodes.

I think this would go well together with my proposal above to make the
vertex editor independent from the node tool.


> And of course, expose and allow editing z and m values.

Editing of Z/M values should be already supported - or am I wrong?


> @Martin: would you have time fixing the vertex editor during the bug fixing
> period, or should I ask another dev?

Yeah I can handle that - of course first we need an agreement how the
vertex editor should behave...

Cheers
Martin