[QGIS-Developer] Thoughts on using processing models for ETL tasks

[johnrobot]

Hi
I have been testing building models in Processing and I have some additional
thoughts.

- I would like to see better documentation, including descriptions and
examples, including images where applicable, for all algorithms. For quite a
few algorithms, there seems to be no documentation in the tool at all.
- Not exclusively related to Processing, but support for reading data from
LDAP would be valuable.
- How about support for duplicating a model in the model list? I can imagine
that I would like to create similar models somewhere down the road.
- It should be possible to drop files outside of QGIS directly on a model
and use it as input.
- In the algortihm for dropping attributes, it seems that I manually have to
enter the attributes to remove. The drop down list is empty. Is this
intended? I would prefer a list/window where I can select one or more
attributes to drop.
- When writing to a SHP file that already exists, I get a Python error. When
I remove the file and run the model again, it works as expected.
- When writing to an excel file and the file already exists from a previous
model run, all of the featres are replaced. There should be an option for
how to handle this case. Replace the file, truncate, add features to the
existnig content.
- How do I write to multiple data sets in the same model? For me, it is not
uncommon that I want to create for example SHP and excel output in the same
job, but I don´t see how to create more than one output file.
- When I write features with a geometry to an excel file, I get a Python
error and the result is emty. If I drop the geometries in the model, it
works as expected. Of course, excel files can´t contain geometry, but when
writing to file formats that don´t support geometry, the geometry should be
ignored and not cause an error.
- I would like to see support for using a template for styling the exel
files created with a model. For example fonts, locking the first row and so
on.
- The algorithm for calculating the shortest path onlys seems to allow
selecting start and end point manually from the map. In some cases, I have a
large table with coordinates for start and end points and I would like to be
able to use these attributes instead, creating one route for each
combination of points. Perhaps this would be good candicate for using
OpenCL?

Any thoughts?

Regards,

Magnus



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