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Working With Attributes - QGIS

The document describes how to query and select features from a GIS vector layer based on attribute values in QGIS. It provides steps to find all capital cities from a dataset that have a population greater than 1 million, and export the selected features as a GeoJSON file.

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Raghu Kottala
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13 views17 pages

Working With Attributes - QGIS

The document describes how to query and select features from a GIS vector layer based on attribute values in QGIS. It provides steps to find all capital cities from a dataset that have a population greater than 1 million, and export the selected features as a GeoJSON file.

Uploaded by

Raghu Kottala
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Working with Attributes (QGIS3)

GIS data has two parts - features and attributes. Attributes are structured data
about each feature. This tutorial shows how to view the attributes of a GIS vector
layer and do basic queries on them in QGIS.

Overview of the task


The dataset for this tutorial contains information about populated places of the world. The
task is to query and find all the capital cities in the World that have a population greater than
1 million and save the resulting subset as a GeoJSON file.

Other skills you will learn


 Select features from a layer using expressions.
 Using the Attributes toolbar.
 Exporting selected features in a layer.

Get the data


Natural Earth provides a Populated Places dataset. Download the simple (less columns)
dataset.
For convenience, you may directly download a copy of the dataset from the link below:
ne_10m_populated_places_simple.zip
Data Source [NATURALEARTH]

Procedure
1. Locate the ne_10m_populated_places_simple.zip file in the QGIS Browser
and expand it. Select the ne_10m_populated_places_simple.shp file and drag
it to the canvas.
2. A new layer ne_10m_populated_places_simple will now be loaded in QGIS
and you will see many points representing the populated places of the world. The
default view in the QGIS canvas shows the geometry of the GIS layer. Each point also
has associated attributes. Let’s view them. Locate the Attributes Toolbar. This
toolbar contains many useful tools to inspect, view, select, and modify attributes of a
layer.
Note
If you do not see the toolbar, you can enable it from View ‣ Toolbars ‣ Attributes Toolbar.
3. Click the Identify button on the Attributes Toolbar. Once the tool is selected, click
on any point on the canvas. The associated attributes of that point will be displayed in
a new Identify Results panel. Once you are done exploring attributes of different
points, you can click the Close button.
4. Rather than viewing the attribute one feature at a time, we can view them all together
as a table. Click the Open Attribute Table button on the Attributes Toolbar. You
can also right-click the ne_10m_populated_places_simple layer and
select Open Attribute Table.
5. You can scroll horizontally and locate the pop_max column. This field contains the
population of the associated place. You can click twice on the field header to sort the
column in descending order.
6. Now we are ready to perform our query on these attributes. QGIS uses SQL-like
expressions to perform queries. Click Select features using an expression button.
7. In the Select By Expression window, expand the Fields and Values section and
double-click the pop_max label. You will notice that it is added to the expression
section at the bottom. If you aren’t sure about the field values, you can click the All
Unique button to see what the attribute values are present in the dataset. For this
exercise, we are looking to find all features that have a population greater than 1
million. So complete the expression as below and click Select Features and
then Close.
"pop_max" > 1000000
Note
In the QGIS Expression engine, text with double-quotes refers to a field and text with single-
quotes refer to a string value.
8. You will notice that some rows in the attribute table are now selected. The label
window also changes and shows the count of selected features.
9. Close the attribute table window and return to the main QGIS window. You will
notice that a subset of points is now rendered in yellow. This is the result of our query
and the selected points are the ones having pop_max attribute value greater
than 1000000.
10. Let’s update our query to include a condition that the place should also be a capital in
addition to having a population greater than 1 million. To quickly get to the
expression editor, you can use the Select Features by Expression button in
the Attributes Toolbar.
11. The field containing data about capitals is adm0cap. The value 1 indicates that the
place is a capital. We can add this criteria to our previous expression using
the and operator. Enter the expression as below and click Select Features and
then Close.
"pop_max" > 1000000 and "adm0cap" = 1
12. Return to the main QGIS window. Now you will see a smaller subset of the points
selected. This is the result of the second query and shows all places from the dataset
that are country capitals as well as have population greater than 1 million.
13. Now we will export the selected features as a new layer. Right-click
the ne_10m_populated_places_simple layer and go to Export ‣ Save
Selected Features As…
14. You may choose any format of your liking as the Format. For this exercise, we will
choose GeoJSON. GeoJSON is a text-based format that is used widely in web
mapping. Click the … button next to File name and
enter populated_capitals.geojson as the output file.
15. The input data has many columns. You are able to choose only a subset of the original
columns for export. Expand the Select fields to export and their export
options section. Click Deselect All and check the name and pop_max columns.
Click OK.
16. A new layer populated_capitals will be loaded in QGIS. You can un-check
the ne_10m_populated_places_simple layer to hide it and view the points from
the newly exported layer.

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