[Qgis-user] QEP: Layer Notes

[Stewart Holt]

I have been wanting a feature like this and after reading the proposal, I
saw comments suggesting the use of metadata for this purpose. I think the
intent of the proposal is to place notes or reminders relevant for a
particular project. That would be useful and I would like to see that
implemented. But reading this led to my investigating using MD for this
purpose. I suggest some changes to make metadata more useful in general.

 MD is a heavyweight feature but there is no requirement to fill out more
than you need. I filled out MD for a dataset and saved the .qmd file next
to the shapefiles. I had to navigate to the directory where the shapefile
resided. I opened another project which included this same layer and looked
at the metadata which was blank as I expected. I imported it. This time
QGIS opened the dialog in the needed directory but I suspect that it was
because it saved the last directory path rather than using the path of the
layer file. Based on this,  I think it would be a useful enhancement for
the MD form to by default save to and restore from the layer file's
directory if it is a file based layer.

Whereas the proposal in question is best being project based, Metadata is
best connected to the layer source itself rather than being in the project
file. This is easily possible for shapefile layers by having the .qmd file
present. The exercise described above involved adding an explanation of how
the Z and M values were derived and included information on accuracy for
certain sections. If I improve this layer and save the new annotations to a
.qmd file, I would like for other projects to use the updated information
rather than have to remember to import a newer .qmd file in each project.
Would it be reasonable to have the .qmd file associated with a file based
layer override (or replace, or remove) MD stored in the project file for
that layer? I trust that if I replaced a shapefile layer with a different
set of files with the same pathname but a different projection, QGIS would
use the projection specified in the .prj file rather than anything that
might have been stored in the project file. MD should work the same.

Stewart

On Sun, Jan 31, 2021 at 11:48 PM Nyall Dawson <nyall.dawson at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I've just submitted a new QGIS enhancement proposal detailing support
> for user created "notes" for map layers. You can read the details
> here: https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Enhancement-Proposals/issues/206
>
> I'm after feedback on this proposal and am trying to determine how
> widespread the use-case is, and how desirable it is to have this
> functionality available in QGIS out-of-the-box (vs as a plugin).
>
> Nyall
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