search

nsidc / qgreenland

Source code for generating the QGreenland package hosted at https://qgreenland.org/
https://qgreenland.readthedocs.io
Other
36 stars 9 forks source link

Consider renaming "online" layer terminology #655

Closed MattF-NSIDC closed 1 year ago

MattF-NSIDC commented 1 year ago

"Remote" layers instead?

All the layers are online in some way (http/cmr/manual). So maybe "remote" is a better way to label our "gdal remote"/wms/wfs/wcs layers.

Twila: Or something like "remotely-hosted".

twilamoon-science commented 1 year ago

I think the group name "Internet-required data" is solid. Descriptive and should continue to describe any subgroup/layers within it. I'd be OK closing this.

MattF-NSIDC commented 1 year ago

@trey-stafford I'm struggling to remember with this issue; was this an idea for an internal code naming change? I don't think it was for the naming in the Layers Panel. I should have been more clear when I opened this... :frowning_face:

trey-stafford commented 1 year ago

That's a good question. My immediate impression was that this was aimed at the layer group naming. Maybe we intended to aim this at re-thinking terminology around online assets?

Given the ambiguity and question around action on this, I would agree with closing.

trey-stafford commented 1 year ago

Actually, thinking about this again - I realize that we must have meant the model around online assets.

I think the mention of "gdal_remote" is OBE. The original description here was referring to the fact that most of our assets come from the internet (e.g., an HttpAsset is obtained from an online resource), but our OnlineAsset is really just a reference to a layer hosted online & accessed through a service instead of from data stored on disk.

The handling of the term "online" is a bit messy in the code too. For example, we have a function called vector_or_raster that is typed to return one of "Raster", "Vector", or "Online", but our mapping from provider -> layer type doesn't include "Online", so vector_or_raster will only return what it's function name indicates - "Vector" or "Raster".

The only place we appear to use the "Online" QgsLayerType is in the export code that produces the layer csv. This puts "Online" in the "Vector or Raster" column for online layers! That seems confusing. Maybe a separate field for "On disk" that is true/false would be a better indicator. Online assets are still either vectors or rasters!

Draft PR to partially resolve this issue here: https://github.com/nsidc/qgreenland/pull/728