[QGIS-Developer] Export PDFs from the processing modeler

[Olivier Dalang]

Dear List,

(I took the liberty to CC in some of you that I thought may be interested
by this)

I'm dreaming of using the QGIS graphical modeler to output PDFs using print
composers. This would allow to build very interesting report generators
using our favorite tool. As far as I understand, currently, it is not
possible.

I'd be interested in working to implement it, to start with as a plugin
(prototype), and once this works see if we can integrate into core.

What I thought of so far is to be able to specify as inputs :
- a QGIS project [file] (using the current project if empty - esp. useful
in conjunction with the great new embedded models feature)
- a composer name [string] (use the first one if empty)
- N layers [layer] (I don't think we can support variable inputs count, so
could be 5)
- N layer ids [string] (id of the layer in the project to be replaced by
corresponding input)

The algorithm would replace the datasources from the file, and then export
the pdf somehow (yet to be determined how, but there seem some good
resources <https://gis.stackexchange.com/a/289228> around this).

I'm not sure it's the best way... I especially don't really like the use of
layer ids (as they are not easy to find). Maybe layer name would be better
(even if there may be duplicates, but the user has control on the QGIS
project so that may be acceptable).

Has anyone done any work that goes in that direction ?

Do you have some ideas about implementation ?

Cheers,

Olivier
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