I was glad to read about this “Offline Editing Plugin for QGIS”. For many working in enterprise environments, the idea of handling a disk full of separate files is a nightmare (or a nightmare waiting to manifest if it hasn’t already), particularly in a mobile collection scenario. So being able to have an app download data from database sources and sync them back online later has the potential to really help manage spatial data.
From sourcepole.ch:
“For data collection, it is a common situation to work with a laptop or a phone offline in the field. Upon returning to the network, the changes need to be synchronized with the master data source, e.g. a PostGIS database. If several persons are working simultaneously on the same datasets, it is difficult to merge the edits by hand, even if people don’t change the same features.
Therefore, Mathias Walker implemented an offline plugin for QGIS. This plugin automates the synchronisation by copying the content of a datasource (usually PostGIS or WFS-T) to a spatialite database and storing the offline edits to dedicated tables. After being connected to the network again, it is possible to apply the offline edits to the master dataset.”
Links and instructions from the full article page. Guess I’ll have to get back to building QGIS from sources to try it out, at least until it’s rolled into a repository or core feature set.
+1
