QGIS has made its mark in FOSS4G and third party plugins make it more and more attractive. I will introduce two more plugins today which could also be useful for you.
MultiQml
If you have many layers that require a similar style, you have to assign style for each layer one by one. Not any more, MultiQml can perform this tedious task for you.
First load all required layers. Second, style any one layer and save the styling information as ‘QGIS Layer Style File’ below. You can use ‘Layer properties’ form to save styles (see below).
Start MultiQml from menu, perform the following
- Raster / Vector layer type
- Select all layers
- Apply style
The final operation will apply the same style (theme) to all the layers (in one go, saves a lot of time :)).
Table manager
In QGIS, if you want to change the attribute of shape file it is not possible directly. For example, you want to change the upper case character in field ‘Name’ to ‘name’, you cannot do that.
Now some one might think, why would I want to change the attributes from upper to lower characters. Well …. actually you don’t need to until you wan to upload this shape file to PostgreSQL/Postgis. If you have upper case character as attribute names (or as field names in database terms), you cannot access them (in a query) like normal attributes. For example a select on country shape file with upper character (below) will return an error
select * from country where Name = ‘Sweden’;
one way to to correct the above query is to use quotes in field name
select * from country where “Name” = ‘Sweden’;
OR use ‘Table manager’ plugin to edit the attribute names. Start ‘Time Manager’ and it will pick the active layer and will show you all the attributes (below)
You can rename a attribute, change attribute order, clone an attribute, insert an attribute and delete an attribute.
Script & Debug 