stacked colours according attributes

Question

I have a hierachical List of attributes e.g. column (1) S (2) SD (3) SD0 or (1) A (2) AN (3) An1 etc. So there is one S with several SD s and several SD0 in the attribute table. When I display column (3) I wonder if there is an automatic way to set the colours in a stacked way i.e. all S different grey colours all A different blue etc. All I could find was the rule based way but then it is still a lot of work because there are so many types in column 3. Is there a way to use the other columns, in my case for example column 1 to classify?

Thank you for help!!

Answer 1

So what you basically want is categorized colouring of multiple specific polygon/vector attributes, if i understand you right. Depending on your attribute-structure maybe this can be done through the rule-based labeling in qgis, if you use categories intelligently.

• Select rule-based labeling on your polygon File
• Apply a simple filter for one of your coloumns (select all)
• Rightclick on your filter and select -> refine current rule -> add categories
• here you can add any gradient as you like and apply it to your coloumn style

the category-based colouring should be available from qgis 1.8 on. See the nice blog post from underdark for the new labeling features