Hi list, The subject is a bit polemical, on purpose. I am used to playing with Postgis, spatialite and GeoJson, which are all open-source ways to store spatial data.
I am very frustrated by the limitations of the Shapefile format, and much more by the quasi obligation to use it as the default vector format in QGIS. I mean for non power users who do not use PostGIS or spatialite. Correct me if I am wrong, but Shapefile is at present the only non database format QGIS can edit, speaking of structure : columns addition and deletion, etc. But Shapefile is very limited in my point of view compared to database storage : I cannot rename a column, my column name are truncated to keep under 10 letters, etc. I would love to see GeoJSON (and potentially topoJson [1] ) as the format officially used by QGIS. I am always confused during courses when I spend time learning people how to adapt to Shapefile limitations. And the users can be a bit puzzled to use Shapefile coming from ESRI with an opensource software. I know OCG reckon Shapefile as a standard format...but still... Some work has to be done to be able to use GeoJSON in QGIS the way I want: * GeoJson can have multiple geometry types in the same files / QGIS cannot handle them -> not a big deal, let use only one geometry type per geojson file * We must write down a specific driver which handle it --> doing so, we would have a very powerful tool, and we could implement topoJson to improve performance (and add the ability to create a spatial index too) What I would like to be able to do * open a GeoJSON, and edit it with QGIS * Modify the structure with no limitations : - long column names if I want to (I prefer to choose myself and can be wise enough not to use something crazy) - rename columns - reorder columns - change a column type from string to integer, float/integer, whatever if the data is compatible, warn if not possible - etc. I would love to hear from you about this idea. Am I the only one frustrated by the current situation ? Cheers, Michael [1] https://github.com/mbostock/topojson
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