[Qgis-user] WFS Support in QGIS ?!

[Peter Willis]

Hello,

I see support for WMS layer import which works reasonably well.
I am not seeing WFS feature support, including the attribute
data that belongs to the requested feature.

WFS support in a GIS is, in some ways, more important than WMS
support. This is due to the fact that the GIS can already 'map'
things. The point of a GIS is to be able to analyze geographic data
based on the assigned attributes given to geographic locales.

Being able to use WMS to make pretty pictures is all well and good.
The *real* work of GIS has always been in the data analysis.

The OGC standards for geographic data interchange
(ie: WFS, WMS, SOS, WCS, GML, TML,...etc.)
should be the main focus of any aspiring GIS product/application.

QGIS programmers can be proud of the fact that they are one of
only 4 applications that reasonably support WMS. There are a
few non-free applications out there that are supporting WMS
very poorly.

There are currently *NO applications* that are properly supporting
WFS. Although I haven't looked at ESRI products lately. It would be
quite a coupe for QGIS to move ahead of the pack by supporting
import/export of the majority of the OGC specifications.


NOTES:

While testing, using a multi-polygon vector with 31478 polygons,
each with 3 attributes,I have noticed that **BOTH** Mozilla Thunderbird
and M.S Internet Explorer run out of memory while downloading large WFS
vector requests in XML format.

I downloaded the same vector using 'wget'. The resulting XML file size
was a bit larger than 82MB.

When developing robust applications for WFS (or any other XML format)
it may be wise to anticipate massive files.

Best Regards,

Peter