Open files from the browser via qgis:// urls

[m-mohr]

Feature description

Several programs offer to open things in programs via a URL, e.g.

• facetime://+19995551234 opens the facetime app and calls a number
• unreal://<server>[:<port>]/ opens a game and connects to a game server
• webcal://example.com/calendar.ics opens a calender program and adds the meeting to the calender
• etc.

It would be nice to offer a way to open (online) data sources such as a COG (e.g. https://example.com/ndvi.tif) through a link/url (e.g. qgis://raster?uri=https://example.com/ndvi.tif), so if you put a link such as <a href="qgis://raster?uri=https://example.com/ndvi.tif">Open NDVI image in QGIS</a> and you click it on a web page it should open it in QGIS automatically instead of e.g. clicking through this: https://www.cogeo.org/qgis-tutorial.html

Additional context

Other registered protocols: https://www.iana.org/assignments/uri-schemes/uri-schemes.xhtml & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_URI_schemes

[jacoscaz]

Opening a .qgz project via URL would be a wonderful feature. We're dealing with a use case in which we generate projects programmatically and the ability to open QGIS and automatically load generated projects would make for a significant UX improvement.

[m-mohr]

I'm still wondering, is this possible at all? If yes, how much funding would it need?

[agiudiceandrea]

@m-mohr, please see https://www.qgis.org/en/site/forusers/commercial_support.html.