[SoC] Week 11: Web API plugin for QGIS Desktop

[Kevin Stadler]

1. What did you get done this week?

Activities split by deliverable/repository:

1.a QGIS plugin (https://gitlab.com/qgisapi/networkapi/commits/master)

- added passing (and parsing) of CRS arguments to various (new)
methods, most importantly iface.addVectorLayer

- brought some argument names in line with the QGIS API as well as
several other fixes


1.b R package (https://gitlab.com/qgisapi/rqgisapi/commits/master)

- added more methods (setExtent, setDestinationCrs, mapLayer.crs,
mapLayer.setCrs

- added support for and better handling/passing of CRS objects

- added support for Spatial* classes to iface.addVectorLayer

- several other fixes and documentation updates


1.c documentation and outreach

- Finished complete Rmarkdown replication of the MalariaRisk notebook,
have a look at it here:
http://qgisapi.gitlab.io/qgis-notebooks/MalariaRisk.html

- More R package documentation at
http://qgisapi.gitlab.io/rqgisapi/reference/index.html



2. What do you plan on doing next week?

- try implementing dynamic application of styles using a JSON-based
"QGISPythonClassName": [ constructor-args ] format

- fix CRS passing (see below)

- add no more features! move on to wrapping up work, fixing bugs and
creating documentation for the end of the project


3. Are you blocked on anything?

- It's not clear what the best/most robust way of passing complex CRS
specifications to QGIS is, neither WKT nor proj4 seem to be reliable
in all cases, see here:
https://gitlab.com/qgisapi/rqgisapi/issues/4#note_37258236

- A very general question that might be of interest to other
(self-contained) GSoC projects too: what is the recommended open
source license for the project? The QGIS plugin template that we
started off with has a reference to GPL-2 in it with the copyright
retained by the plugin author (rather than passing it on to the Free
Software Foundation), for the R package we haven't chosen a license
yet at all. Any input is welcome on this!