To avoid reading large capabilities documents

Question

I have a large WFS server containing 1500 layers. When i read the capabilities document it takes for ever to load.

Thats ok. Using the QGIS Network logger, i detects that when i add layers to my map, it reads the capabilities document again for each layer WHY?. So it takes forever times the number of layers to load.

So i have stored the capabilities.xml locally and when i add reads this its opens in a couple of msec.

But it wont open the layers in the document it fails on DescribeFeatureType with this error:

file:///C:/Temp/getcapabilities.xml?SERVICE=WFS&REQUEST=DescribeFeatureType&VERSION=1.0.0&TYPENAME=Layername

I have tried using it on localhost but with same error.

So it does not use the online ressources in the capabilities document.

It this possible in some way

Answer 1

This sounds like a bug and an enhancement request. QGis should definitely honour the URLs provided in it and probably provide an option to ignore them in the same way as the WMS client code does.

QGis should almost certainly cache the capabilities document by default, and again provide an option to force rereading it every time. In fact it should probably cache the parsed representation of the document to save parsing it.