Difficulty Accessing QGIS Tool

[Mariana Manrique Tondati]

Hello,

I would like to use the tool in QGIS to carry out part of a research project. However, I am currently experiencing difficulties accessing it. Is the plugin down, or is it undergoing some updates?

Thank you in advance.

Best regards,
Mariana

[Whitebox Geospatial Inc]

Hi Mariana,

 

I just pushed a new version of the QGIS plugin (v1.1.1) this morning that resolves an issue that some users were experiencing with the last release, which was released earlier this week. I’m not sure how long it will take to approve this latest release, but it’s usually within a couple of days.

 

The new versions of the plugin have a fairly substantial change to them, which you may have encountered. In the past, I distributed the plugin with the tool description files. These are files contained within the ‘descriptions’ folder of the plugin and provide, as the name suggests, descriptions of each of the available tool parameters to the QGIS Processing infrastructure. As of the last release, I have stopped distributing these files along with the plugin and instead the plugin now automatically generates these files. This approach has certain advantages. In particular, when I update the WhiteboxTools backend that the plugin communicates with (the code that’s actually doing the processing), the plugin will now automatically update those descriptions. So, if there are tools where the parameters change (say a different input type or value) between releases, it doesn’t require everyone to download a fresh set of description files. Also, there has been the issue with QGIS plugin users and the Whitebox Toolset Extension (WTE). Namely, I have always distributed the description files for the 70(ish) tools contained in the WTE as well as the 450(ish) tools in the open core. That means that users would see these 70 tools listed but don’t have access to them. Despite the fact that when you try to run the tool, it issues a, what I think is pretty obvious, error that states that you require a license for the WTE to run this tool, we would get frequent emails from people saying, “hey why can’t I run this tool, I’m getting an error.” With the new set up, users will only see the WTE tools in the QGIS plugin if they have the WTE installed…relief!

 

However, the downside with this new approach is that when you first install the QGIS plugin, you won’t see WhiteboxTools listed in the Processing toolbox until you have connected it to the WhiteboxTools backend, by setting the location of the WhiteboxTools executable file. At that point, it will trigger the creation of the description files and you’ll see the plugin in the toolbox. There is a message when you install it indicating that this is the case, but again, it may not be all that obvious to some users. This latest release (v1.1.1) fixes some of the issues that users have encountered with this description file generation method. I’m hoping that you’ll be able to see it soon once it’s approved.

 

Given that this email is already much longer than I had hoped it to be, I may as well also point out that if you are having issues with the WhiteboxTools QGIS plugin, you can always transition to the Whitebox Workflows (WbW) QGIS plugin instead. To be frank, this is the better of the two options because WbW has many advantages over WhiteboxTools and the plugin has several improvements (e.g., inline help documentation). I would certainly recommend using it instead (I do). In my opinion, WbW is far better than WhiteboxTools for anything involving Python scripting and if you are interacting with the tools through QGIS. WhiteboxTools still has its place in that I haven’t yet developed a plugin for ArcGIS (that’s still to come but I’m working on it) and our R users, of which I know there are many, still currently cannot use WbW and are left using WhiteboxTools instead. I’m so sorry for the rather long-winded response, but I hope that answers your question.

 

Regards,

 

John Lindsay

 

 

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WhiteboxTools" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to whiteboxtool...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/whiteboxtools/6745e60c-0e00-4880-979d-17e42c1819a9n%40googlegroups.com.