qgpkg

Introduction

qgpkg implements a GeoPackage extension to store QGIS mapping information in a GeoPackage database file. The OGC geopackage format was designed with the goal of being interoperable across a range of environments, in particular mobile devices operating in offline and near offline scenarios.

This plugin introduces two approaches for storing mapping projects, based on two different geopackage extensions: the QGIS extension and the OWC context extension.

The goal of the qgis geopackage extension is to enable users to share their QGIS projects, including style and resources. This extension stores a QGIS project file in one of the extension tables, which works for the described use case, but does not allow interoperability with other GIS software.

The owc geopackage extension was designed with the specific goal of enabling interoperability with other GIS software, being completely based on OGC standards. The idea is to store styling using OGC:SLD, and the project context using OGC:OWS_Context, so that other software can encode/decode this information.

In both extensions, data, resources and style are packed along with project information (e.g.: layer order or visibility, bounding box), enabling a self-contained, portable mapping project.

QGIS plugin

The QGIS plugin adds a toolbar button for saving the current project in a GeoPackage file and another one for loading a QGIS project from a GeoPackage file.

Support is given for loading multiple layers and styles from the geopackage. In the examples folder you may find examples of geopackages using the qgis and owc extensions.

Although the user can read from either extension, using a detection mechanism, currently the writing operation is only supported for the qgis extension. If you are interested in writing geopackages using the owc extension, please have a look at ArcGIS GeoCat Bridge.

qgpkg library and cli

In addition, gpkg is implemented as a Python library with a command line interface.

Commands:

usage: qgpkg.py [-h] {info,write,read} ...

Store QGIS map information in GeoPackages

optional arguments:
  -h, --help         show this help message and exit

commands:
  valid commands

  {info,write,read}
    info             GeoPackage content information
    write            Save QGIS project in GeoPackage
    read             Read QGIS project from GeoPackage

Please note that the cli supports only for the qgis extension.

History

This plugin was initially created by Cédric Christen and Pirmin Kalberer (Sourcepole) using the qgis_extension approach. Later it was forked by Joana Simoes and Paul van Genuchten (GeoCat), who added support to the owc_extension. The fork was merged into the master branch, to create this version: a plugin which enables users to read projects using either geopackage extension. Support to writing in both extensions, is also envisioned for the near future.

Compatibility

This plugin requires QGIS 2.18 and GDAL 2.0 or newer.

On Ubuntu Linux you can install GDAL 2 from the UbuntuGIS repository and on OS X, you can use the package compiled by King Chaos.

Development

git clone https://github.com/pka/qgpkg.git

Running tests:

apt-get install python-nose

nosetests

For running qgpkg commands from source tree:

alias qgpkg="PYTHONPATH=$(pwd) $(pwd)/qgpkg_cli/qgpkg.py"

Issues

You are welcome to report any issues using the github track.

License

qgpkg is Copyright © 2016-2017 Sourcepole AG. It is free software, and may be redistributed under the terms specified in the LICENSE.txt (Library - MIT) and LICENSE (Plugin - GPL V2) files.