Importing all layers available on server for WFS in PyQGIS?

Question

I'm trying to access data from a WFS-server, E.g. https://geo.barentswatch.no/geoserver/bw/ows?

I manage to import single layers by:

uri = "https://geo.barentswatch.no/geoserver/bw/ows?srsname=EPSG:4326&typename=bw:npdsurveyongoing_latest&version=1.0.0&request=vlayer=QgsVectorLayer"
vlayer = QgsVectorLayer(uri, "bw:npdsurveyongoing_latest", "WFS")
QgsMapLayerRegistry.instance().addMapLayer(vlayer)

However, I want to import all available layers and would like them to automatically to be named by their original typeName. Seems a bit unnecessary to hardcode all names in beforehand accessing the server, but I have been struggling to figure out the codes for this.

Any way to do this in pyqgis?

Answer 1

Not the cleanest of solutions but you could use a combination of urllib2 to read your XML file and regular expressions to extract the names.

So we can:

• Loop through each line in the XML file
• Extract the names of the layers
• Insert the names into the same uri you provided
• Then add it to QGIS

---

This is the code I used:

import urllib2, re

file = urllib2.urlopen('https://geo.barentswatch.no/geoserver/ows?service=wfs&version=1.0.0&request=GetCapabilities')
data = file.read()
string = '<FeatureType><Name>(.+?)</Name><Title>'
for word in data.split():
    layer = re.search(string, word)
    if layer is not None:
        uri = "https://geo.barentswatch.no/geoserver/bw/ows?srsname=EPSG:4326&typename={name}&version=1.0.0&request=vlayer=QgsVectorLayer".format(name = layer.group(1))
        vlayer = QgsVectorLayer(uri, layer.group(1), "WFS")
        QgsMapLayerRegistry.instance().addMapLayer(vlayer)

file.close()

Result:

Answer 2

For others new to WFS in python, I also fount OWSLib to be quite helpful, ref.: https://geopython.github.io/OWSLib/

An easy approach to list all layers (which could be looped through for import in QGIS):

from owslib.wfs import WebFeatureService
wfs = WebFeatureService(url='https://geo.barentswatch.no/geoserver/ows?', version='1.0.0')
list(wfs.contents)