Adding a field to a vector layer

This recipe demonstrates adding a new field to a layer. Each field represents a new column in a data set for which each feature has a new attribute. When you add a new attribute, the attribute value for all existing features are set to NULL for that field index.

Getting ready

We will use the New York City museums shapefile used in other recipes, which you can download as a ZIP file here:

https://github.com/GeospatialPython/Learn/raw/master/NYC_MUSEUMS_GEO.zip

Extract this shapefile to /qgis_data/nyc.

How to do it...

All data management for a layer is handled through the layer's data provider, and fields are no different. We will load the layer, access the data provider, define the new field, and finalize the change: ...

Get QGIS Python Programming Cookbook - Second Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.