initAlgorithm() method
This allows 2 benefits:
- algorithms can be subclassed and have subclasses add additional
parameters/outputs to the algorithm. With the previous approach
of declaring parameters/outputs in the constructor, it's not
possible to call virtual methods to add additional parameters/
outputs (since you can't call virtual methods from a constructor).
- initAlgorithm takes a variant map argument, allowing the algorithm
to dynamically adjust its declared parameters and outputs according
to this configuration map. This potentially allows model algorithms which
can be configured to have variable numbers of parameters and
outputs at run time. E.g. a "router" algorithm which directs
features to one of any number of output sinks depending on some
user configured criteria.
The previous naming was too easily confused with processing outputs.
Rename them to QgsProcessingParameterFileDestination, etc... to
make it clearer what they are used for.
This implements an improved version of vector.createVectorWriter
in QgsProcessingUtils. The improved version relies on the
core class QgsVectorLayerImport to create empty layers,
which:
- reduces duplicate code and reuses the mature QgsVectorLayerImport
routines
- avoids manual conversion of field types to destination provider
field types
- potentially allows any writable provider to be used as a feature
sink for algorithms (e.g. output direct to MSSQL/Oracle/db2). This
should work now - it just needs exposing via UI.
Algorithms and other processing code should use this method
(instead of dataobjects.getLayerFromString) to
retrieve layers from a string, as it considers the processing
context and allows resolving strings to temporarily stored layers.
This permits processing models to function correctly when
intermediate results are stored as memory layers. Subsequent
model algorithms can then access these temporary layers as inputs.
All temporary layers will be removed when the context object
is destroyed after the model algorithm is run.