Change in print behaviour - subfolder "layouts" spawned

[meyerlor]

Hello,

i kind of got a (small) heart attack - i could not find my printed layouts anymore. Usually they got saved into the Kontrollberichte subfolder of my project (QGIS atlas print layout is set up in that way). I did not check this folder regularly but continued creating printed reports. I wanted to check on them and bam- none where found for the last couple of months. After a lot of searching, i found them in the new subfolder layouts/Kontrollberichte.

It is not mentioned in the documentation nor in any of the release notes that the behaviour changed. What was/is the idea of that change? I do not really see an advantage, as project admin i carefully set up the folder structure, which is now "ignored" by QField. Is it possible to circumvent the "layout" subfolder? Many other references outside of QField point to that folder, it would be a hustle to change them.

The change must have come between 17.02.2025 and 24.02.2025, so i guess with the Fangorn branch of QField?

Greetings,
Lorenz

[nirvn]

@meyerlor , the change was made as users were reporting large nb of PDFs sitting in the root of their projects. I'm wondering if the best solution would be to detect the presence of user-entered subfolder, and if so not putting the PDFs in the layouts folder.

[meyerlor]

ah okay, i see that makes sense (and i had the problem, too, before i found out i can set via the atlas expression a subfolder).

Detecting an already set subfolder would indeed be a desirable solution imho! 👍

[meyerlor]

sorry to bugger around, but as more and more projects would require me changing the path manually, just wanted to check if i should do this or sit it out until the detection of a user-enabled subfolder will come to qfield?

[beanzmo]

@nirvn

[nirvn]

@meyerlor , hey there sorry for the long delay in answering, and thanks for the ping @beanzmo . ATM it's in the to do list but the list is large and this specific issue is buried by other more important shortcomings and improvements. In the meantime have you been able to adapt to the new folder or you're still eager to see this happening?

[meyerlor]

it's not super urgent, i will adapt where it is needed but would be glad to see it resolved at some point - the path created by QField is not only used by QField (also by Lizmap and QGIS) so it creates quite a backlog to change all dependent projects.