Category: QGIS

Posted on 2 CommentsQGIS

Announcing our SLYR (MXD to QGIS) funding drive!

One product which North Road had the chance to develop last year, and which we are super-proud of, is our SLYR ESRI style to QGIS conversion tool. If you haven’t heard of it before, this tool allows automatic conversion of ESRI .style database files to their equivalent QGIS symbology equivalent. It works well for the most part, and now we’re keen to take this to the next stage. The good news is that North Road have been conducting extensive research and development over the past 12 months, and we’re pleased to announce our plans for extending SLYR to support ESRI LYR and MXD documents. The LYR and MXD formats are proprietary ESRI-only formats, with no public specifications allowing their use. This […]

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On custom layout checks in QGIS 3.6, and how they can do your work for you!

Recently, we had the opportunity to implement an exciting new feature within QGIS. An enterprise with a large number of QGIS installs was looking for a way to control the outputs which staff were creating from the software, and enforce a set of predefined policies. The policies were designed to ensure that maps created in QGIS’ print layout designer would meet a set of minimum standards, e.g.: Layouts must include a “Copyright 2019 by XXX” label somewhere on the page All maps must have a linked scale bar No layers from certain blacklisted sources (e.g. Google Maps tiles) are permitted Required attribution text for other layers must be included somewhere on the layout Instead of just making a set of […]

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Edit Features “In Place” crowdfund — made it to QGIS 3.4!

Well, thanks to the resounding success of our QGIS edit-in-place crowdfunding campaign, we’ve been frantically smashing away at our keyboards in an attempt to reward the QGIS community by sneaking this feature in a whole 4 months earlier than originally promised! And, we’re very proud to announce, that this exciting new feature has been implemented and will be included in the upcoming QGIS 3.4 release (due late October 2018). So go ahead — grab one of the nightly pre-release of QGIS 3.4 and checkout the results. This wouldn’t have been possible without the rapid response to the campaign and the generosity of our wonderful backers: Alta ehf, Reykjavik, Iceland Kristianstads kommun, Sweden MBS Environmental, Perth, Australia Andreas Neumann Chartis Technology, […]

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Edit Features “In Place” crowdfund — target reached!

Well, the final pledges have been tallied and we’re very proud to announce that our latest crowd funding campaign has been a roaring success! We’ve been completely blown away by the response to this campaign. Thanks to some incredibly generous backers and donors, we’ve been able to hit the campaign target with plenty of time to spare. As a result, we’ll be pushing hard to reward the generosity of the community by trying to sneak this feature in for the upcoming QGIS 3.4 release (instead of the originally promised 3.6 release)! You can read more about what we’re adding at the campaign page. We’d like to take this opportunity to extend our heartfelt thanks to all the backers who have pledged to […]

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Edit Features “In Place” Using QGIS Spatial Operations crowdfund launched!

We’ve just launched a new QGIS crowd funding campaign which we’re super-excited about! This time, we’re addressing what we see as the major shortcoming within QGIS vector layer editing tools, and bridging the gap between the vast power of QGIS’ Processing algorithms and easy-to-use operations which modify layer features “in place”. Here’s a quick sneak preview of what we have planned:   QGIS is already a vector editing powerhouse, and we believe that this improvement will boost the current functionality up an order of magnitude! To make it possible we need 6500€ pledged before 30 September 2018. This is also our first crowdfunding campaign in which we’re running a “dual funding” approach, which we think should make things friendly and […]

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Drill down (cascading) forms in QGIS crowdfund – final stretch!

Update: donations are now closed, with the outcome of the campaign pending! We’re nearing the final hours of our crowd funding campaign to implement a drill-down (cascading) field support within QGIS forms, and thanks to numerous generous backers we’re very close to hitting the funding goal! This is a really exciting new feature which would help add greater flexibility and power to QGIS feature forms, but in order to implement it for QGIS 3.2 we need to hit the funding target by 11 May 2018. As a result, we’re dropping the minimum contribution amount and throwing open the campaign for payments of any amount. These smaller payment will be treated as direct donations to the campaign, so unlike the standard campaign backing […]

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Drill-down (cascading) forms in QGIS crowdfund launched!

We’ve just launched a new crowd funding campaign to implement a drill-down (cascading) field support within QGIS forms. Full details are available on the campaign page. This is a really exciting new feature which would help add greater flexibility and power to QGIS feature forms! To make it possible we need 3500€ pledged before 11 May 2018. You can help make this a reality by supporting the campaign or by sharing the page and increasing exposure to the campaign. Updates to follow!

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Implementing an in-house “New Project Wizard” for QGIS

Recently, we were required to implement a custom “New Project Wizard” for use in a client’s internal QGIS installation. The goal here was that users would be required to fill out certain metadata fields whenever they created a new QGIS project. Fortunately, the PyQGIS (and underlying Qt) libraries makes this possibly, and relatively straightforward to do. Qt has a powerful API for creating multi-page “wizard” type dialogs, via the QWizard and QWizardPage classes. Let’s have a quick look at writing a custom wizard using these classes, and finally we’ll hook it into the QGIS interface using some PyQGIS magic. We’ll start super simple, creating a single page wizard with no settings. To do this we first create a Page1 subclass […]

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Exploring Reports in QGIS 3.0 – the Ultimate Guide!

In 2017 North Road ran a crowd funding campaign for extending QGIS’ Print Composer and adding a brand new reporting framework to QGIS. Thanks to numerous generous backers, this campaign was a success. With the final QGIS 3.0 release just around the corner, we thought this was a great time to explore the new reporting engine and what it offers. We’ll start with a relatively simple project, containing some administrative boundaries, populated places, ports and airports. Using the “Project” – “New Report” command, we then create a new blank report. Initially, there’s not much to look at – the dialog which is displayed looks much like the QGIS 3.0 Layout Designer, except for the new “Report Organizer” panel shown on […]

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24 Days of QGIS 3.0 Features

If you’re not following @northroadgeo on Twitter, you’ve probably missed our recent “24 Days of QGIS” countdown. Over December, we’ve been highlighting 24 different features which are coming with the QGIS 3.0 release. We’ve collected all of these below so you can catch up: 1 of #24daysofqgis : Coming soon in #QGIS 3.0 – inbuilt CAD style digitizing tools, for easy rectangle/circle/ellipse+other creation! (Thanks to Loïc Bartoletti) #qgisadvent pic.twitter.com/Y7zjPO6Axh — North Road (@northroadgeo) December 1, 2017 Day 2 of #24daysofqgis : Coming soon in #QGIS 3.0 – responsive autocompleted field values when selecting by feature attributes! (Thanks to @nyalldawson) #qgisadvent pic.twitter.com/ySQPKYihIv — North Road (@northroadgeo) December 2, 2017 Day 3 of #24daysofqgis : Coming soon in #QGIS 3.0 – interactively […]

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