New features about project validation

When publishing a project with QGIS server, there are some known issues when the server needs to load the projet :

• A layer can be visible in QGIS desktop, but unfortunately not visible in QGIS server.
• The loading time of the project can be too long.

These issues can have different sources :

• A layer invisible in QGIS server :

  • Is the PostgreSQL service well configured on the server side ?
  • Does the file used for the layer (FlatGeobuf, Geotiff…) is readable by QGIS server with the same path ?

• About project loading time, the source of the problem can be very different and complex. In some situations, it can be easy, like asking QGIS to use "estimated metadata" for PostgreSQL layers or also to force geometry simplification on the data provider side.

These issues are very common, so we decided to include some rules in the plugin.

With the latest release of the plugin, you could start seeing some new checks when saving your Lizmap configuration file. You could also notice some safeguards, which are designed to help you to publish your project (prevent some possible errors on the server side).

Let's have a quick look to these two new features.

Checks

With the latest version of the QGIS Lizmap plugin, you could notice a new table when saving your configuration file.

This table is a list of checks which have failed when saving the configuration.

• All checks are documented : source of error, how to fix the error and its severity
• Some checks are blocking. For now, only checks which take one minute maximum are blocking. Today, most of the blocking rules have a button to auto-fix the whole project.

You should still have a look to other non-blocking issues, as some of them might decrease QGIS server performance. But as it's not straightforward to fix, we didn't make these rules blocking.

To know how to fix, either put your mouse over the last column, a complete description will appear. Or visit the next tab "Help about checks", it's presenting all rules with some explanations how to fix them.

We will add new checks in the coming weeks.

Safeguards

By default, when installing the Lizmap plugin on a computer, you will be considered as "Beginner". This mode is very strict about what you can do in your QGIS project. It was mainly designed for a Lizmap training.

We guess users will quickly switch to "Normal", but you can still tweak these settings in the last panel.

These safeguards are designed to help you. It will prevent some layers to maybe not be visible on Lizmap Web Client.

If you know your server doesn't support ECW raster, you can keep this checkbox ticked.

Note, if you are hosted on our Lizmap Cloud infrastructure, some safeguards are configured with some default values. For instance, on our hosting solution, the maximum of parent folder allowed when you add a file based layer is two folders.

When you are in "normal" mode, please uncheck these checkbox carefully. Some of them requires some configuration steps on the server side.

We hope you will enjoy this new version 🦎

Etienne Trimaille