All-in-one Project QGIS Plugin

This is a software project (with potential plugin) about sharing and using of a whole "QGIS project" including data and symbology (styles).

• A project by Geometa Lab HSR
• Project Lead: Stefan Keller
• Author/Developer: Tobias Schmitz and Rafael Krucker from Geometa Lab HSR
• Project status: Still in development (nothing published yet on http://plugins.qgis.org/).

Project Weblinks:

• Website: this (to be published on http://plugins.qgis.org/)
• Repository: private repo on scm-manager git.hsr.ch (https://git.hsr.ch/git/PortableProjectQGis Version 0.0 2014-06-10)
• Project notes, issues, bugs and feature requests: (on scm-manager git.hsr.ch).

See also QGIS, QGIS-Materialien

While this plugin is not available pls. try out following alternatives:

• "relocator" QGIS Plugin - Relocates all your project data to a specific local directory. Version 0.9 2015-05-08 with minimal QGIS v2.0.0. Autor Riccardo Klinger, Geolicious. plugins.qgis.org, github
• "QConsolidate" QGIS Plugin - Consolidate QGIS project into one directory. Version 0.2.1 2014-01-29 with minimal QGIS v2.0.0. Autor Alexander Bruy. plugins.qgis.org github

Background

Often users want to share QGIS project including possibly local data, symbology (style/styling) and settings.

Related use cases:

• There is also a proposal to put all data and related styling info into a single GeoPackage file.
• For sharing QGIS styles (.qml), QGIS symbols definitions (.xml) and SVG markers there's a GSoC project (see wiki.osgeo.org and @akbargumbira github) which implements a web application to allow users use them in QGIS.
• For sharing geospatial data there are web services (WFS, WMS etc.), file sharing services and QGIS map publishing services (QGISCloud, CartoDB, etc.).

An obvious approach for a QGIS project and data publisher is to put everything - including data, styles and project settings - into one file.

When copying/moving project files to other people, it is necessary to manually collect all required files and update the project file. This is even more complicated when working with map layers from databases, web services or temporary (in-memory) data. See also Martin Dobias' GSoC 2012-Proposal. It's related to the proprietary ArcGIS Layer and ArcGIS Map Packages and the standardized GeoPackage.

Issues:

• Data:
  • A map layer source is stored in files somewhere locally
  • A map layer source is a remote web service which requires credentials
• Styling:
  • SVG files are stored somewhere locally or remote
  • Color Ramps are stored somewhere locally or remote
  • Required symbol fonts are installed locally
• Others:
  • A plugin enables or changes a Layer source functionality. There are data resources which require plugins, which are eventually not installed. See e.g. Editable_GeoCSV_QGIS_Plugin GeoCSV.
  • A styling default changed after in a new QGIS version

Discussion

The user must be able to specify what should be inside the project:

1. link everything (no zipping, just plain XML as before)
2. include everything (put all files into zip),
3. hybrid (put some resources into zip, keep something as a link, e.g. put symbol SVGs into ZIP but keep original links to layers)

Internally the all-in-one projects could work in a fashion similar to ODT from LibreOffice or KMZ from Google Earth: All files required by the projects would be identified and put into a ZIP file (together with the project XML file).