LocationFinder for QGIS

This repository contains a Plugin for QGIS that allows using a LocationFinder instance for interactive geocoding.

Geocoding finds coordinates given a name (or an address). Reverse geocoding finds the closest named point (or address) given a point's coordinates.

LocationFinder is a fast and friendly interactive search engine over your address and place data with plentiful configuration possibilities for fine-tuning the end user's search experience; see https://dirageosystems.ch for more information.

This plugin is published online in the QGIS plugins repo at https://plugins.qgis.org/plugins/location_finder/ and can be installed from within QGIS using its Plugins menu.

This README file addresses developers. For user-directed documentation, see the README.md inside the plugin folder.

Deploy locally (for testing)

Copy the location_finder folder (not only its contents) to your QGIS profile's python plugins folder: %APPDATA%\QGIS\QGIS3\profiles\default\python\plugins (Windows) or ~/.local/share/QGIS/QGIS3/profiles/default/python/plugins (Linux).

You may use the provided scripts deploy.bat or deploy.sh for this purpose, and you may use the Plugin Reloader plugin to reload the deployed plugin into a running instance of QGIS.

Publish to plugins.qgis.org

Create a zip archive from the location_finder folder (not only the folder's contents) and upload it to https://plugins.qgis.org (you will need an OSGeo ID). You may use the publish.sh or publish.bat scripts; for detailed instructions, see https://plugins.qgis.org/publish/

Technical Notes

• this is a Python Plugin for QGIS
• initial template created with the QGIS Plugin Builder, see http://g-sherman.github.io/Qgis-Plugin-Builder/
• the plugin itself consists of the location_finder folder; a zip archive of it can be uploaded to the QGIS plugin repo
• I prefer keeping the plugin folder clear of dev and build tooling and thus moved things like Makefile, scripts/, and test/ out of it (the Makefile is therefore no longer valid and should be revised)
• UI created using the free Qt Designer that comes with the QGIS OSGeo4W installer (Windows .msi)
• tooling: VS Code with the Python extension (had to create .env file that sets the PYTHONPATH variable for QGIS and Qt stuff to be found)
• use pyrcc5 to compile resources.qrc into resources.py – pyrcc5 comes with OSGeoW but requires o4w_env.bat to be run first (search the QGIS installation directory for this script); otherwise, pyrcc5 or one of its requirements will not be found
• warning: I'm new to QGIS development and I'm also new to Qt development
• message levels for use in iface.messageBar().pushMessage() and QgsMessageLog.logMessage() are: Qgis.Info, Qgis.Warning, Qgis.Critical, Qgis.Success
• a detailed tutorial on building a Python plugin for QGIS3 is at https://www.qgistutorials.com/en/docs/3/building_a_python_plugin.html

Developer Resources

The PyQGIS Developer Cookbook at
http://www.qgis.org/pyqgis-cookbook/index.html

The minimal QGIS Python plugin can be seen at
https://github.com/wonder-sk/qgis-minimal-plugin/

The Qt Designer Manual at
https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtdesigner-manual.html

About Python environments with VS Code see
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/python/environments

Documentation for the requests HTTP library at
https://requests.readthedocs.io/

Background

QGIS has no integrated geocoding client, but geocoding plugins exist, for example, mmqgis provides batch geocoding, GeoCoding provides interactive geocoding against Nominatim or Google data, and BGK Geocoder works against German BKG address data (requires a commercial license). https://guides.library.ucsc.edu/DS/Resources/QGIS has a limited comparison.