[QGIS-Developer] Temporal controller issues

[Richard Duivenvoorde]

On 1/2/21 1:17 AM, Cory Albrecht wrote:
> Can somebody help me under the basics of how things work inside QGIS starting from when it loads all the features for a layer through the steps, and then finally drawing them on the map canvas, specifically with respect to the new temporal controller (NTC)?
> 
> The issues caused by the NTC have been very frustrating for me as I make mostly (historical) timeline maps and I relied heavily on the old TimeManager (OTM) plugin by Antia Graser and group. So many tasks are now much more laborious or difficult because so many tools are just not time-aware.
> 
> Was it not possible to add the NTC in such a way that would have still let all the other features work as before with the filtered feature set before being made time-aware, rather than confusingly operating on the unfiltered set? Or perhaps it shouldn't have been turned on until the infrastructure was there for the tools to be time-aware right away?
> 
> Because I've just submitted yet another bug about the NTC, this time for the selection tool <https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/issues/40818>, and it has me more than a little annoyed. As a result of this bug I now have an unknown number of duplicate objects in multiple layers across multiple databases/projects that I unknowingly pasted into them over the past several months since the NTC was added to QGIS.
> 
> I feel that the NTC was both poorly thought out and badly implemented as all these bugs would indicate.

Hi Cory,

Let's try to stay positive. NTC is still young, and rapidly evolving. It is hard to keep up with all (possible) use cases. In my case it was nice that the select tool DID return ALL features (as I needed it to create a graph in time of measurements in one point). So I proposed earlier (cannot find it now), to make this an option in the select tools: "use/not use Time Filter". But this all takes time ;-)

In the meantime:
- you can maybe use "Delete duplicate geometries" [0] to remove the duplicates?
- if really in need of the old TimeManager, you can change the metadata.txt so OTM will still work in current master. In this line:
https://github.com/anitagraser/TimeManager/blob/master/metadata.txt#L7
change '3.12' to '3.18'
- if you need MemoryLayers to work (like I did), then you have to add another patch. Let me know if you need that.

In the meantime: everybody involved in TimeBased data: let's discuss use-cases and make NTC better... in time...

Regards,

Richard Duivenvoorde

[0] https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/133207/removing-overlapping-duplicate-polygons-in-same-layer-using-qgis/133221