QThread and loading QGIS memory layers

[Matthijs.Bon]

Hi, I know this is a QT forum and my question seems to be mostly about QGIS plugins, but I think, after many debugs, that the problem is somewhere within QThread, therefore, I post here as well, and the GIS stackexchange so far yielded nothing... I've been working on a small plugin recently and I wanted to add a progress bar to it, since there are tasks in this plugin that take some time to complete. I looked at this and this, but so far I've encountered a problem which I can't seem to solve.

Whenever I run the plugin without moving it to another thread, it runs perfectly fine, everything works (but the GUI is unresponsive for a short while). But when I move the worker (the python class that does the heavy lifting) to another thread, suddenly, I can't seem to add the QgsVectorLayer (which is a memory layer) to the iface.LegendInterface anymore. Everything else still works fine, but the layer just does not show up in the legend in QGIS. So far, this is my code, I've left out the specific methods and imported code, since that all works if I don't move it to a thread (so I figure that can't be the problem):

from PyQt4 import QtCore
from qgis.core import *
from qgis.gui import *
import utility_functions as uf

import traceback

class Worker(QtCore.QObject):

def __init__(self, iface, data, layer, plugindir, outfile):
    QtCore.QObject.__init__(self)
    self.iface = iface
    self.data = data
    self.layer = layer
    self.plugindir = plugindir
    self.outfile = outfile
    self.killed = False
    self.PathLayer = None

finished = QtCore.pyqtSignal(object)
error = QtCore.pyqtSignal(Exception, basestring)
progress = QtCore.pyqtSignal(float)
layerCreated = QtCore.pyqtSignal(object) # tried for debugging, does not work

def run(self):
    ret = None
    try:
        # Create edgelist
        edgelist = self.selectEdges()

        # Select features on layer and copy to new layer
        features = self.selectFeatures(edgelist, self.layer)

Everything works perfectly fine up until here. In the method 'createNewLayer', the memory layer should be (1) created using QgsVectorLayer, and (2) Loaded using QgsMapLayerRegistry.instance().addMapLayer(layer)

        self.createNewLayer(features)

        # Apply layer style
        if not self.PathLayer:
            lyr = uf.getLegendLayerByName(self.iface, 'Path')
        else:
            lyr = self.PathLayer
        self.applyStyle(lyr)

        if self.killed is False:
            self.progress.emit(len(self.data))
            ret = lyr
    except Exception, e:
        # forward the exception upstream
        self.error.emit(e, traceback.format_exc())
    self.finished.emit(ret)

But somehow, the moving to another thread messes with the layer and it can't be added. What's even weirder: I can see the layer when I type into the QGIS python console: QgsMapLayerRegistry.instance().mapLayers() and the return variable ret is a pointer to a vectorlayer. So I'm guessing that the way QThreads work, messes up the QgsMapLayerRegistry OR the iface.LegendInterface.

I'm working on macOS Sierra, QGIS 2.14, Qt 4.8.6, but I've also tried the plugin on a W10 machine, QGIS 2.18, same problems. Any help would be greatly appreciated, this problem is messing with my brain!

[SGaist]

Hi and welcome to devnet,

Sorry not an answer, but I'd recommend asking this to the QGIS folks, they might be more informed about the interaction of their classes with QThread.

One of the thing to keep in mind is that GUI related classes should not be manipulated outside the GUI thread which is usually the application main thread e.g. you can't manipulate a QPixmap in a thread but you can a QImage.