online geojson sources

[mstuyts]

If a website contains a geojson file as source, web2qgis makes a copy of that file to a temp directory. Since QGIS supports online geojson sources (Source type Protocol for vector layers), do you think it would be a good idea to add the online source as a layer in QGIS instead of the file in the temp directory?

[tomchadwin]

I was wondering about this for WFSes. The expected behaviour would be to import the layer as a WFS into QGIS, rather than to extract the JSON and save it. I didn't realize QGIS could open a remote GeoJSON, so we could take the same approach.

However, there are some possible downsides:

• layer would be read-only in QGIS
• encouraging inclusion of other people's content, thereby taking their bandwidth

What do you think? I need to think about this more.