.
QGIS uses the OGR library to read and write vector data formats, including ESRI shapefiles, MapInfo and MicroStation file formats, AutoCAD DXF, PostGIS, SpatiaLite, Oracle Spatial and MSSQL Spatial databases, and many more. GRASS vector and PostgreSQL support is supplied by native QGIS data provider plugins. Vector data can also be loaded in read mode from zip and gzip archives into QGIS. As of the date of this document, 69 vector formats are supported by the OGR library (see OGR-SOFTWARE-SUITE in Literatur dan Referensi Web). The complete list is available at http://www.gdal.org/ogr/ogr_formats.html.
Catatan
Not all of the listed formats may work in QGIS for various reasons. For example, some require external commercial libraries, or the GDAL/OGR installation of your OS may not have been built to support the format you want to use. Only those formats that have been well tested will appear in the list of file types when loading a vector into QGIS. Other untested formats can be loaded by selecting *.*.
Working with GRASS vector data is described in Section GRASS GIS Integration.
This section describes how to work with several common formats: ESRI shapefiles, PostGIS layers, SpatiaLite layers, OpenStreetMap vectors, and Comma Separated data (CSV). Many of the features available in QGIS work the same, regardless of the vector data source. This is by design, and it includes the identify, select, labeling and attributes functions.
The standard vector file format used in QGIS is the ESRI shapefile. Support is provided by the OGR Simple Feature Library (http://www.gdal.org/ogr/).
A shapefile actually consists of several files. The following three are required:
Shapefiles also can include a file with a .prj suffix, which contains the projection information. While it is very useful to have a projection file, it is not mandatory. A shapefile dataset can contain additional files. For further details, see the ESRI technical specification at http://www.esri.com/library/whitepapers/pdfs/shapefile.pdf.
To load a shapefile, start QGIS and click on the Add Vector Layer toolbar button, or simply press Ctrl+Shift+V. This will bring up a new window (see figure_vector_1).
Figure Vector 1:
From the available options check File. Click on [Browse]. That will bring up a standard open file dialog (see figure_vector_2), which allows you to navigate the file system and load a shapefile or other supported data source. The selection box Filter allows you to preselect some OGR-supported file formats.
You can also select the encoding for the shapefile if desired.
Figure Vector 2:
Selecting a shapefile from the list and clicking [Open] loads it into QGIS. Figure_vector_3 shows QGIS after loading the alaska.shp file.
Figure Vector 3:
Tip
Layer Colors
When you add a layer to the map, it is assigned a random color. When adding more than one layer at a time, different colors are assigned to each layer.
Once a shapefile is loaded, you can zoom around it using the map navigation tools. To change the style of a layer, open the Layer Properties dialog by double clicking on the layer name or by right-clicking on the name in the legend and choosing Properties from the context menu. See section Style Menu for more information on setting symbology of vector layers.
Tip
Load layer and project from mounted external drives on OS X
On OS X, portable drives that are mounted beside the primary hard drive do not show up as expected under File ‣ Open Project. We are working on a more OSX-native open/save dialog to fix this. As a workaround, you can type /Volumes in the File name box and press Enter. Then you can navigate to external drives and network mounts.
To improve the performance of drawing a shapefile, you can create a spatial index. A spatial index will improve the speed of both zooming and panning. Spatial indexes used by QGIS have a .qix extension.
Use these steps to create the index:
If you load a shapefile with a .prj file and QGIS is not able to read the coordinate reference system from that file, you will need to define the proper projection manually within the General tab of the Layer Properties dialog of the layer by clicking the [Specify...] button. This is due to the fact that .prj files often do not provide the complete projection parameters as used in QGIS and listed in the CRS dialog.
For the same reason, if you create a new shapefile with QGIS, two different projection files are created: a .prj file with limited projection parameters, compatible with ESRI software, and a .qpj file, providing the complete parameters of the used CRS. Whenever QGIS finds a .qpj file, it will be used instead of the .prj.
To load a MapInfo layer, click on the Add Vector Layer toolbar button; or type Ctrl+Shift+V, change the file type filter Files of type : to ‘Mapinfo File [OGR] (*.mif *.tab *.MIF *.TAB)’ and select the MapInfo layer you want to load.
To load an ArcInfo Binary Coverage, click on the Add Vector Layer toolbar button or press Ctrl+Shift+V to open the Add Vector Layer dialog. Select Directory as Source type. Change the file type filter Files of type to ‘Arc/Info Binary Coverage’. Navigate to the directory that contains the coverage file, and select it.
Similarly, you can load directory-based vector files in the UK National Transfer Format, as well as the raw TIGER Format of the US Census Bureau.
Tabular data is a very common and widely used format because of its simplicity and readability – data can be viewed and edited even in a plain text editor. A delimited text file is an attribute table with each column separated by a defined character and each row separated by a line break. The first row usually contains the column names. A common type of delimited text file is a CSV (Comma Separated Values), with each column separated by a comma.
Such data files can also contain positional information in two main forms:
QGIS allows you to load a delimited text file as a layer or ordinal table. But first check that the file meets the following requirements:
As an example of a valid text file, we import the elevation point data file elevp.csv that comes with the QGIS sample dataset (see section Contoh data):
X;Y;ELEV
-300120;7689960;13
-654360;7562040;52
1640;7512840;3
[...]
Some items to note about the text file:
Click the toolbar icon Add Delimited Text Layer in the Manage layers toolbar to open the Create a Layer from a Delimited Text File dialog, as shown in figure_delimited_text_1.
Figure Delimited Text 1:
First, select the file to import (e.g., qgis_sample_data/csv/elevp.csv) by clicking on the [Browse] button. Once the file is selected, QGIS attempts to parse the file with the most recently used delimiter. To enable QGIS to properly parse the file, it is important to select the correct delimiter. You can specify a delimiter by activating Custom delimiters, or by activating Regular expression delimiter and entering text into the Expression field. For example, to change the delimiter to tab, use \t (this is a regular expression for the tab character).
Once the file is parsed, set Geometry definition to Point coordinates and choose the X and Y fields from the dropdown lists. If the coordinates are defined as degrees/minutes/seconds, activate the DMS coordinates checkbox.
Finally, enter a layer name (e.g., elevp), as shown in figure_delimited_text_1. To add the layer to the map, click [OK]. The delimited text file now behaves as any other map layer in QGIS.
There is also a helper option that allows you to trim leading and trailing spaces from fields — Trim fields. Also, it is possible to Discard empty fields. If necessary, you can force a comma to be the decimal separator by activating Decimal separator is comma.
If spatial information is represented by WKT, activate the Well Known Text option and select the field with the WKT definition for point, line or polygon objects. If the file contains non-spatial data, activate No geometry (attribute only table) and it will be loaded as an ordinal table.
Additionaly, you can enable:
In recent years, the OpenStreetMap project has gained popularity because in many countries no free geodata such as digital road maps are available. The objective of the OSM project is to create a free editable map of the world from GPS data, aerial photography or local knowledge. To support this objective, QGIS provides suppport for OSM data.
QGIS integrates OpenStreetMap import as a core functionality.
PostGIS layers are stored in a PostgreSQL database. The advantages of PostGIS are the spatial indexing, filtering and query capabilities it provides. Using PostGIS, vector functions such as select and identify work more accurately than they do with OGR layers in QGIS.
The first time you use a PostGIS data source, you must create a connection to the PostgreSQL database that contains the data. Begin by clicking on the Add PostGIS Layer toolbar button, selecting the Add PostGIS Layer... option from the Layer menu, or typing Ctrl+Shift+D. You can also open the Add Vector Layer dialog and select Database. The Add PostGIS Table(s) dialog will be displayed. To access the connection manager, click on the [New] button to display the Create a New PostGIS Connection dialog. The parameters required for a connection are:
Optionally, you can activate the following checkboxes:
Once all parameters and options are set, you can test the connection by clicking on the [Test Connect] button.
Once you have one or more connections defined, you can load layers from the PostgreSQL database. Of course, this requires having data in PostgreSQL. See section Importing Data into PostgreSQL for a discussion on importing data into the database.
To load a layer from PostGIS, perform the following steps:
Tip
PostGIS Layers
Normally, a PostGIS layer is defined by an entry in the geometry_columns table. From version 0.9.0 on, QGIS can load layers that do not have an entry in the geometry_columns table. This includes both tables and views. Defining a spatial view provides a powerful means to visualize your data. Refer to your PostgreSQL manual for information on creating views.
This section contains some details on how QGIS accesses PostgreSQL layers. Most of the time, QGIS should simply provide you with a list of database tables that can be loaded, and it will load them on request. However, if you have trouble loading a PostgreSQL table into QGIS, the information below may help you understand any QGIS messages and give you direction on changing the PostgreSQL table or view definition to allow QGIS to load it.
QGIS requires that PostgreSQL layers contain a column that can be used as a unique key for the layer. For tables, this usually means that the table needs a primary key, or a column with a unique constraint on it. In QGIS, this column needs to be of type int4 (an integer of size 4 bytes). Alternatively, the ctid column can be used as primary key. If a table lacks these items, the oid column will be used instead. Performance will be improved if the column is indexed (note that primary keys are automatically indexed in PostgreSQL).
If the PostgreSQL layer is a view, the same requirement exists, but views do not have primary keys or columns with unique constraints on them. You have to define a primary key field (has to be integer) in the QGIS dialog before you can load the view. If a suitable column does not exist in the view, QGIS will not load the layer. If this occurs, the solution is to alter the view so that it does include a suitable column (a type of integer and either a primary key or with a unique constraint, preferably indexed).
QGIS offers a checkbox Select at id that is activated by default. This option gets the ids without the attributes which is faster in most cases. It can make sense to disable this option when you use expensive views.
Tip
Backup of PostGIS database with layers saved by QGIS
If you want to make a backup of your PostGIS database using the pg_dump and pg_restore commands the default layer styles as saved by QGIS are failing to restore afterwards. You need to set the XML option to DOCUMENT and the restore will work.
Data can be imported into PostgreSQL/PostGIS using several tools, including the SPIT plugin and the command line tools shp2pgsql and ogr2ogr.
QGIS comes with a core plugin named DB Manager. It can be used to load shapefiles and other data formats, and it includes support for schemas. See section Plugin Pengelola DB for more information.
PostGIS includes an utility called shp2pgsql that can be used to import shapefiles into a PostGIS-enabled database. For example, to import a shapefile named lakes.shp into a PostgreSQL database named gis_data, use the following command:
shp2pgsql -s 2964 lakes.shp lakes_new | psql gis_data
This creates a new layer named lakes_new in the gis_data database. The new layer will have a spatial reference identifier (SRID) of 2964. See section Working with Projections for more information on spatial reference systems and projections.
Tip
Exporting datasets from PostGIS
Like the import tool shp2pgsql, there is also a tool to export PostGIS datasets as shapefiles: pgsql2shp. This is shipped within your PostGIS distribution.
Besides shp2pgsql and DB Manager, there is another tool for feeding geodata in PostGIS: ogr2ogr. This is part of your GDAL installation.
To import a shapefile into PostGIS, do the following:
ogr2ogr -f "PostgreSQL" PG:"dbname=postgis host=myhost.de user=postgres
password=topsecret" alaska.shp
This will import the shapefile alaska.shp into the PostGIS database postgis using the user postgres with the password topsecret on host server myhost.de.
Note that OGR must be built with PostgreSQL to support PostGIS. You can verify this by typing (in )
ogrinfo --formats | grep -i post
If you prefer to use PostgreSQL’s COPY command instead of the default INSERT INTO method, you can export the following environment variable (at least available on and ):
export PG_USE_COPY=YES
ogr2ogr does not create spatial indexes like shp2pgsl does. You need to create them manually, using the normal SQL command CREATE INDEX afterwards as an extra step (as described in the next section Improving Performance).
Retrieving features from a PostgreSQL database can be time-consuming, especially over a network. You can improve the drawing performance of PostgreSQL layers by ensuring that a PostGIS spatial index exists on each layer in the database. PostGIS supports creation of a GiST (Generalized Search Tree) index to speed up spatial searches of the data (GiST index information is taken from the PostGIS documentation available at http://postgis.refractions.net).
The syntax for creating a GiST index is:
CREATE INDEX [indexname] ON [tablename]
USING GIST ( [geometryfield] GIST_GEOMETRY_OPS );
Note that for large tables, creating the index can take a long time. Once the index is created, you should perform a VACUUM ANALYZE. See the PostGIS documentation (POSTGIS-PROJECT Literatur dan Referensi Web) for more information.
The following is an example of creating a GiST index:
gsherman@madison:~/current$ psql gis_data
Welcome to psql 8.3.0, the PostgreSQL interactive terminal.
Type: \copyright for distribution terms
\h for help with SQL commands
\? for help with psql commands
\g or terminate with semicolon to execute query
\q to quit
gis_data=# CREATE INDEX sidx_alaska_lakes ON alaska_lakes
gis_data-# USING GIST (the_geom GIST_GEOMETRY_OPS);
CREATE INDEX
gis_data=# VACUUM ANALYZE alaska_lakes;
VACUUM
gis_data=# \q
gsherman@madison:~/current$
Many GIS packages don’t wrap vector maps with a geographic reference system (lat/lon) crossing the 180 degrees longitude line (http://postgis.refractions.net/documentation/manual-2.0/ST_Shift_Longitude.html). As result, if we open such a map in QGIS, we will see two far, distinct locations, that should appear near each other. In Figure_vector_4, the tiny point on the far left of the map canvas (Chatham Islands) should be within the grid, to the right of the New Zealand main islands.
Figure Vector 4:
A work-around is to transform the longitude values using PostGIS and the ST_Shift_Longitude function. This function reads every point/vertex in every component of every feature in a geometry, and if the longitude coordinate is < 0°, it adds 360° to it. The result is a 0° - 360° version of the data to be plotted in a 180°-centric map.
Figure Vector 5:
The first time you load data from a SpatiaLite database, begin by clicking on the Add SpatiaLite Layer toolbar button, or by selecting the Add SpatiaLite Layer... option from the Layer menu, or by typing Ctrl+Shift+L. This will bring up a window that will allow you either to connect to a SpatiaLite database already known to QGIS, which you can choose from the drop-down menu, or to define a new connection to a new database. To define a new connection, click on [New] and use the file browser to point to your SpatiaLite database, which is a file with a .sqlite extension.
If you want to save a vector layer to SpatiaLite format, you can do this by right clicking the layer in the legend. Then, click on Save as.., define the name of the output file, and select ‘SpatiaLite’ as format and the CRS. Also, you can select ‘SQLite’ as format and then add SPATIALITE=YES in the OGR data source creation option field. This tells OGR to create a SpatiaLite database. See also http://www.gdal.org/ogr/drv_sqlite.html.
QGIS also supports editable views in SpatiaLite.
If you want to create a new SpatiaLite layer, please refer to section Creating a new SpatiaLite layer.
Tip
SpatiaLite data management Plugins
For SpatiaLite data management, you can also use several Python plugins: QSpatiaLite, SpatiaLite Manager or DB Manager (core plugin, recommended). If necessary, they can be downloaded and installed with the Plugin Installer.
QGIS also provides native MS SQL 2008 support. The first time you load MSSQL Spatial data, begin by clicking on the Add MSSQL Spatial Layer toolbar button or by selecting the Add MSSQL Spatial Layer... option from the Layer menu, or by typing Ctrl+Shift+M.
The spatial features in Oracle Spatial aid users in managing geographic and location data in a native type within an Oracle database. QGIS now has support for such layers.
The first time you use an Oracle Spatial data source, you must create a connection to the database that contains the data. Begin by clicking on the Add Orcale Spatial Layer toolbar button, selecting the Add Orcale Spatial Layer... option from the Layer menu, or typing Ctrl+Shift+O. To access the connection manager, click on the [New] button to display the Create a New Oracle Spatial Connection dialog. The parameters required for a connection are:
Optionally, you can activate following checkboxes:
Once all parameters and options are set, you can test the connection by clicking on the [Test Connect] button.
Tip
QGIS User Settings and Security
Depending on your computing environment, storing passwords in your QGIS settings may be a security risk. Passwords are saved in clear text in the system configuration and in the project files! Your customized settings for QGIS are stored based on the operating system:
Once you have one or more connections defined, you can load layers from the Oracle database. Of course, this requires having data in Oracle.
To load a layer from Oracle Spatial, perform the following steps:
Tip
Oracle Spatial Layers
Normally, an Oracle Spatial layer is defined by an entry in the USER_SDO_METADATA table.