this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Geographic Information Systems

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Field tools: what are the options? (self.gis)
submitted 1 year ago by rtbravo to c/gis
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I'm curious if anyone else has experience with tools for editing and collecting data in the field.

I'm vaguely aware of QField for QGIS. I believe ESRI has their own tools for that context, but I don't know what they are.

I'm also familiar with some tools for a specific industry: namely inspection and data collection for utilities. Some of the ones I know are probably best described as "long in the tooth."

What are the options these days? Where do you go for users that need to collect data in the field, whether it's inspection data, correcting existing GIS data, or collecting new data?

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[–] SkadusX 2 points 1 year ago

I’ve been trying QField off and on as an exploratory thing for my organization and I’ve been having trouble nailing down the underlying problems behind some issues I’ve had. The test has been pretty rudimentary; just adding points and syncing, online and offline, with a WMS basemap.

Some stuff I’ve noted (these are all AFAIK, someone please correct me if I’m wrong, because I really want this to work):

  • the iOS app requires you to use iTunes for file management unless you use QField Cloud, and it’s been a while since I’ve tried it but it’s kind of a manual process to sync rather than a push button solution within QGIS.

  • I was able to set up a postgis layer with offline sync, but it created a gpkg copy of it that never seemed to write back to the original table. Direct access to the postgis layer worked well, but seemed to require an outward facing server (QField Cloud had a “secrets” tab for this, I think). I managed to get it working, but then our test server got pulled out from under us and I’ve not gotten our internal servers to connect over VPN to my phone.

It seems very close to being what we want, but just barely not making it, and with no clear idea of what’s failing and where.