Book Image

QGIS 2 Cookbook

By : Alex Mandel, Víctor Olaya Ferrero, Anita Graser, Alexander Bruy
Book Image

QGIS 2 Cookbook

By: Alex Mandel, Víctor Olaya Ferrero, Anita Graser, Alexander Bruy

Overview of this book

QGIS is a user-friendly, cross-platform desktop geographic information system used to make maps and analyze spatial data. QGIS allows users to understand, question, interpret, and visualize spatial data in many ways that reveal relationships, patterns, and trends in the form of maps. This book is a collection of simple to advanced techniques that are needed in everyday geospatial work, and shows how to accomplish them with QGIS. You will begin by understanding the different types of data management techniques, as well as how data exploration works. You will then learn how to perform classic vector and raster analysis with QGIS, apart from creating time-based visualizations. Finally, you will learn how to create interactive and visually appealing maps with custom cartography. By the end of this book, you will have all the necessary knowledge to handle spatial data management, exploration, and visualization tasks in QGIS.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
QGIS 2 Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Converting points to lines to polygons and back – PostGIS


The goal of this recipe is identical to the previous two recipes, but it covers how to perform the process with data in a PostGIS database. You will use it to turn points into lines, and lines into polygons.

Not all methods are available; for those not available, you can use the previous recipe. It will also work on a database layer; it just doesn't save the results to the database. So, the results will need to be imported to the database after completion.

Getting ready

You need to load a vector layer of points with a numeric ID indicating order, and an identifier of unique lines or polygons that is shared between points of the same geometry. For example, you can use census_wake_2000_points loaded into PostGIS with the geometry field called geom. (Refer to Chapter 1, Data Input and Output, the Loading Vector Data into PostGIS recipe to see how to load data into PostGIS.)

Tip

Import as single not multigeometries. Otherwise, you'll need...