QGIS » QGIS Application

This is an improvement to allow QGIS to load pre-symbolized layers, in one step, data source and symbology. This is different (better) from what is available today: load layer, apply .qml, or load layer with .qml with the same name in a particular folder.

This would ideally work with 2 new options in the layer context menu, like "save styled layer" and "load styled layer", that would save and load a layer as is in the project.

Advantages to the present capability:

i) we can have a single data source with several .qml allowing multiple representations of the same data, prepared and made available to users in an organization by a GIS team

ii) user don't need to know about data structure, this is in fact abstracted. Users work with "themed data", like population by county, or income by county, regardless if the data comes from a shapefile or PostGIS

iii) this will allow a GIS dept. in an organization to prepare a shared folder with a set of layers that the users can load, in fact creating a standard for their GIS, regarding the data used, and the symbology applied.

This is common practice in other GIS software, like ArcGIS (.lyr files) and AutoCAD Map (don't know the file extension).

As it stands now, using QGIS a user has to i) know which data to load; ii) know which attribute holds the needed data; iii) know how to symbolize the layer. And the reusability of this work is very limited (to a project?).

The ability to automatically apply a .qml that has the same name as the the data source has several limitations: i)it works based on a a single PC configuration, depending on the user; ii) it is limited to 1 .qml per data source; iii) it is difficult to scale to several users in a managed context.

Duarte