Attribute sets

Free text fields are where survey data goes to die. Give four people a box labelled “lamp type” and you will get back four vocabularies, none of them wrong and no two of them the same, and the cost lands weeks later on whoever has to produce a figure from it. By then the person who wrote “SON 70w” is on another job and cannot tell you whether it was the same thing as “70W sodium”.

An attribute set is the form defined once: the fields, their types, and the lists of values people choose from rather than type. Build it at a desk where you can think about it, and the phone offers a list in the field.

A set is not tied to one layer. The same list of surface types can sit behind a point layer of gullies, a line layer of kerbs and an area layer of patches, so the words match across a job rather than by coincidence. Export a set to the app and it becomes part of the project you collect with.

When a set is part of a released cloud project it travels with it, ids intact, so every contributor’s device holds the same links between layers, fields and values. That is what makes the merge on the way back meaningful: two devices agreeing on what a column is called is the precondition for merging what is in it.

Sets are yours until you share them. A set you design is private, and it moves into an organisation the moment you share it with a group there, as one act rather than a move followed by a share.

Designing attribute sets is part of a Mapit Pro subscription. It needs no team, no organisation and no cloud subscription: a surveyor working alone can design their own sets, keep them personal and export them to their own phone. Pro+ is what owning an organisation and holding a manager seat require, which is a different question from designing a form.

Reading and downloading sets you already own is not gated at all, including if a subscription lapses. Your data does not become hostage to a renewal.