QGIS » QGIS Application

I'll add this as an option, many people like the fact that the original source is just read.

In my opinion the default would be just create a memory layer (instead of defaulting to create a shapefile as it is now).

I think when Carson created fwtools that the memory layer was not mature enough (or even not available), but nowadays it's easy to create one in Python and put geomtries+attributes in it.

In this way a user can always decide her/himself to save it as a shapefile (for operations which add a column) or copy/paste the geometries to the original file (for operations which just create some geometries, like buffers etc))

In this way it is easier to try out some parameter values for an operation without having 16 shapefile related files somewhere on you disk named 'test1, test2 etc etc' :-)

Off course for huge shapefiles it is better to create a shapefile immediatly, but then that is up to the user to decide...

Most other tools just add columns. Duplicating geometries seem unnecessary.

Is this implemented either in Sextante or fTools already? If not, I suggest this is a feature enhancement and move to a later QGIS version.

The "ftools" category is being removed from the tracker, changing the category of this ticket to "Processing/QGIS" to not leave the category orphaned.