Oslandia is baking some awesome QGIS 3 new features

QGIS 3.0 is now getting closer and closer, it’s the right moment to write about some major refactor and new features we have been baking at Oslandia.

A quick word about the release calendar, you probably felt like QGIS 3 freeze was expected for the end of August, didn’t you?

In fact, we have so many new major changes in the queue that the steering committee (PSC), advised by the core developers, decided to push twice the release date up up to the 27 of October. Release date has not be been pushed (yet).

At Oslandia we got involved in a dark list of hidden features of QGIS3.

They mostly aren’t easy to advertised visually, but you’ll appreciate them for sure!

• QGIS server refactoring
  • Full WMS service refactoring
  • Activate multi-threaded rendering
  • Avoid unnecessary database lookup for extent, id, geometry types for views by trusting the project file
  • Deploy a continuous OGC conformity testing platform for WMS
  • Start a first round to fix the conformity failures
  • Stress QGIS server for security breaches and secure with unit tests

• Add  capabilities to store data in the project
  • add a new .qgz zipped file format container
  • have editable joins, with upsert capabilities (Insert Or Update)
  • Transparently store  and maintain in sync data in a sqlite database. Now custom labeling is pretty easy!

• Improve relations with PostgreSQL
  • Better Transaction groups with Undo/Redo stored in the database
  • Trigger QGIS events FROM the database
  • Fix some issues with transaction and triggering some ExecuteSQL statements

• Coordinating work and tests on new node tool for data editing
• Improving Z / m handling in edit tools and layer creation dialogs
• Ticket reviewing and cleaning

Next articles will describe some of those tasks soon.

This work was a great opportunity to ramp up a new talented developer with commit rights on the repository! Welcome and congratulations to Paul our new core committer !

All this was possible with the support of many actors, but also thanks to the fundings of QGIS.org via Grant Applications or direct funding of QGIS server!

A last word, please help us in testing QGIS3, it’s the perfect moment to stress it, bugfix period is about to start !