Changing the Line Direction of Line Features Using the Geometry Generator in QGIS

I have been playing around with roads layers and wanted to change the line directions for some of my features. I looked around for solutions to do this in QGIS and saw that I could use the swap vector direction plugin in QGIS or ST_reverse in PostgreSQL. But I wanted to find a non destructive way to do this as I did not want to alter my data. I decided to try the geometry generator in QGIS.

Normal road symbology showing direction.

I then set out to reverse the line direction using QGIS Geometry generator.

• Activate the style tab in the layer properties.

• Change symbol layer type from Simple Line to Geometry Generator.

• Change geometry type to LineString/MultiLineString.

• In the expression write reverse( $geometry ) to reverse the geometry of the features.

• Change Simple Line to Marker line and symbolize the marker line according to your specifications.

• Symbology should appear like the image below:

• You have your reversed lines showing in the map canvas as

• A side by side comparison of the roads layers