Overview
A user should be able to edit layers she has ‘write’ permissions on, completely through the web or with desktop tools using the WFS-T protocol. Any vector data layer uploaded should be have the option to turn on editing, using the permissions system to control access.
Use Cases
- After uploading a shapefile from her desktop GIS system an analyst realized that she hadn’t saved the latest change. Instead of having to upload the whole file again she should be able to hit ‘edit’ and change the dataset through the web.
- A user who does not have a desktop GIS gets a shapefile and uploads it to a GeoNode. He realizes that there are several mistakes, and instead of downloading and configuring desktop software he should be able to just hit ‘edit’ and change it. Then he can make the changes available as a shapefile for download, or in a variety of other formats and web services.
Specification
Most of this has been built, in OpenLayers and GeoExt. See the OpenGeo Suite’s GeoEditor demo, along with advanced editing functionality like Snapping/Splitting demo.
The permissioning wireframes already have the concept of ‘write’ permissions, so the Map composer application just needs to add the editing buttons if they have the right permissions.
Technical Details
The main technical hurdle to this is getting data in to PostGIS, where it is transactionally secure. Right now uploads of shapefiles just go to a directory, and doing editing against them directly is a bad idea. The front end components are mostly done, firmly in OpenLayers, and there are Ext.js-based components, but there is additional work to clean them up, make them generic, and get them in to GeoExt.