Yes VRT is a good point, but it behaves like another datasource, so geomatic guys will know it, but common user won't. I think having a transparent provider, detecting, reading and writing WKT could not be a solution.
Real life example: - an external enterprise has developped a whole Access DB + VBA macors + forms for my administration. They come to see my at the end of the project, "we would like to map querys results, but we would like to change the data on the fly with the macros... and regenerate the maps.. ". Mapinfo answer... "possible but dangerous, and we're dropping MI, just forget" QGIS answer.. "ouch... export all in shp, ah no, your field names will be truncated, use excel.. ah, clean it up well, no encoding nowhere, .xls 2003, then import, join to your layer, export again in shp (1.8 limitations)... and... CSV could be nice in fact.. NO, access can't export correctly carriage returns, damn! , so ODBC .. Oh non, my sys admin have cut it off for security reasons, $^*ùù!! ".. So I say, "Why didn't you come at start, we would have been working in spatialite environnement..." and no map If I'm not free for the work. BAD. I dream I could answer: "OK, let's add just a new attribute layer with WKT field, and makes queries, the open those table in QGIS, check "detect spatial WKT column", and I have very slow but dynamic maps. I Know spatial index in extremely important, but that would always be better than actual workflow. On a technical point of view, maybe we could lay on VRT GDAL format.. but my concern is to let common user have a simple and clear tool, with no XML input needed. Thoughts? -- View this message in context: http://osgeo-org.1560.x6.nabble.com/storing-and-reading-WKT-geom-in-non-spatial-Datasource-tp5078296p5078409.html Sent from the Quantum GIS - Developer mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ Qgis-developer mailing list Qgis-developer@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer