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I work in an office which uses Mapinfo, and all of our spatial datasets are saved as TAB files. A few of us also use QGIS to supplement our work. We're having issues where if someone has a TAB file open in QGIS, it locks the file so nobody else in the office has read access to it. It also breaks any FME workspace processes.

Any thoughts on how to get around this? We have a lot of files so we'd rather not duplicate everything as shapefiles.

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    Which QGIS version are you running? This should have been addressed with recent versions - now the lock is only applied when the layer is being edited.
    – ndawson
    Commented Jan 24, 2017 at 3:19
  • Can you upgrade to a newer version? I can confirm this does not affect QGIS 2.18 in conjunction with MapInfo 15 and it appears to have been backported to the 2.14 LTS too: hub.qgis.org/issues/14378
    – Tom
    Commented Jan 31, 2017 at 12:53

1 Answer 1

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Install and set some free and spatial enabled database which is supported by all GIS software like

  1. PostgreSQL with PostGIS or
  2. MS SQL express

Upload all your TAB files with MapInfo EasyLoader into the database. After that you can access your tables from QGIS and MapInfo and database will handle multi-user editing.

Installing databases and setup will require some specific knowledge that you and your team maybe dont have but you have a zillion tutorials on the Internet.

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  • This is the only option other than duplicating data or scheduling your usage to avoid conflicts. If you have multiple users working on the same data, you really need a spatial database. I highly recommend PostgreSQL with PostGIS (postgis is the spatial add on for postgresql).
    – jbalk
    Commented Jan 24, 2017 at 0:43
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    Question is about having one user to edit data and others having read- only access. That should be doable if all different software know how to handle locking.
    – user30184
    Commented Jan 24, 2017 at 6:01

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