Reports from the winning grant proposals 2021

With the QGIS Grant Programme 2021, we were able to support eight proposals that are aimed to improve the QGIS project, including software, infrastructure, and documentation. The following reports summarize the work performed in the proposals. 

  1.  QGIS Server and services documentation (#213) – Report
    The Services chapter of the QGIS Server documentation needed some love to
    be effectively representative of the underlying implementation. Numerous
    services, requests or parameters were not documented at all. Some others
    also had very sketchy descriptions. Thanks to this QEP, the Services
    chapter is now in a much better shape!
  2. Rework handling of multi-layer, mixed-format datasets (#216) – Report
    While the work was partly motivated as an opportunity to clean up some
    older parts of the QGIS codebase which were fragile and had low test
    coverage, it has also resulted in many improvements and polish in the
    QGIS user interface.
  3. Port DB Manager Table Management Functionalities to Browser: SQL execution (part 3) (#205) – Report
    Besides SQL execution functionalities, an additional PR adds to QGIS core the query layer management tool that was provided by DB Manager plugin. The new API is fully covered by unit tests.
  4. Locale support for numeric input and display: revision and enhancements (#210) – Report
    The work has been completed with multiple pull requests that fixed all localization issues that have been reported plus countless unreported issues that have been identified along the way.
  5. Integrate GPS Tools plugin functionality into core QGIS (#217) – Report
    This grant sees the removal of the old, unmaintained “GPS Tools” core plugin, with all functionality from the plugin moved to reusable Processing algorithms or the unified Data Source Manager dialog. Since the functionality now uses the Processing framework, users gain the ability to run these tools in batch modes, as part of graphical models, and from 3rd party scripts and plugins. As a bonus the new tools are all fully covered by unit tests.
  6. QGIS Server, OGC tests and Continuous Integration: OGC API Features (part 2 (#212) – Report
    Thanks to the QEP funding, the OGC API Features standard for QGIS Server is
    now checked in QGIS continuous integration since end-November 2021.
  7. Fixing terrain and camera issues in 3D (#215) – Report
    These improvements should make the 3D map view easier to use. Especially the camera control issues (unintuitivie camera rotation and wrong center point) were quite tricky to fix.
  8. Review process on plugins.qgis.org and improvements (#219) – This proposal has been withdrawn.

Thank you to everyone who participated and made this round of grants a great success and thank you to all our sponsor and donors who make this initiative possible!