Switching CRS On The Fly messes up area calculations

[qgib]

Author Name: Charles Rethman (Charles Rethman)
Original Redmine Issue: 8558
Affected QGIS version: master
Redmine category:projection_support

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My data covers whole Southern Africa region -- South Africa up to DRC-- therefore it is stored in Long-Lat WGS84. However, I need to do many calculations with the data such as area, distances etc. and therefore I project to Albers EAC or Lamberts CC (I use UTM for Malawi, Swaziland and Lesotho). I have defined a set of "national" Albers EA CRSs and saved them as user-defined or custom CRSs in QGIS 1.9. The bug happens as follows: I load a set of data that are in Long-Lat and then enable Set CRS On The Fly and change project CRS to my user-defined (custom) one. All the layers are reprojected. If I now load a layer that is in the custom CRS, and then use the Field Calculator to add a column and calculate something on the geometry (such as $Area), I get nonsense numbers in the new calculated field. To get a sensible result, I must first close the file with the long-lat dat in it, and then open the file with the only the custom projection data. I can then do the calculations I require.

In short, it appears QGIS does not like layers with different CRSs, even if they are reprojected On The Fly to whichever one is working in . It works reliably when all the layers have the same CRS.

My Albers EA proj4 definition is +proj=aea +lat_1=-19.3 +lat_2=-25.38 +lat_0=0 +lon_0=24.69 +x_0=500000 +y_0=3000000 +ellps=WGS84 +towgs84=0,0,0,0,0,0,0 +units=m +no_defs.

Example data for Botswana also supplied.

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• demog_eas.prj (Charles Rethman)
• demog_eas.cpg (Charles Rethman)
• demog_eas.shp (Charles Rethman)
• demog_eas.dbf (Charles Rethman)
• demog_eas.shx (Charles Rethman)
• demog_eas.qpj (Charles Rethman)

[qgib]

Author Name: Giovanni Manghi (@gioman)

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it seems duplicate of #14476 - please leave feedback.

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• status_id was changed from Open to Feedback
• os_version was changed from 10.8 to
• operating_system was changed from Mac OS X Mountain Lion to
• priority_id was changed from High to Normal

[qgib]

Author Name: Charles Rethman (Charles Rethman)

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Looking at #14476, my issue is similar, although more specific to 1.9 (2.0 alpha) because the Field Calculator is now a part of the core app functionality. It would make sense to merge the two issues if you like but I think it's important to this release. Also, my feature request #17308--Field Calculations on geometry (such as $Area) should take place in the Project CRS (even that has been re-projected "on the fly") and not in the CRS of the original file--is related to this bug.

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• assigned_to_id was configured as Giovanni Manghi

[qgib]

Author Name: Giovanni Manghi (@gioman)

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• assigned_to_id removed Giovanni Manghi

[qgib]

Author Name: Giovanni Manghi (@gioman)

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see #20259

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• resolution was changed from to duplicate
• status_id was changed from Feedback to Closed