Changing a project's structure

Open the cloud project from Content. Its What is in it panel has an Edit structure button, shown to the organisation’s admin and managers. The page lists the project’s layers on the left and the chosen layer’s fields on the right.

Your changes are saved as you make them, so you can leave and carry on later from any computer. Every admin and manager of the organisation sees the same unsaved changes.

Add layer asks for a name and what it collects: points, lines or polygons. Like every layer the apps create, it is in WGS 84. A new layer comes with a Name field; add the rest after creating it.

Add field asks for a name (letters, digits and _, starting with a letter) and one of six types: Text, Integer, Decimal, Yes/No, Date, and Date & Time. Text and number fields can be Required. A default value is optional, except for a required field on a layer that already has features: those features need a value, and they are given the default.

Until the release, anything you added can be renamed, changed or taken out again. What a release already holds is fixed: a released field cannot be renamed or retyped, and a released layer’s geometry cannot change. Add a new field instead.

Review & release lists your changes. Continue, and Mapit Cloud checks them against the project; anything it cannot accept is listed in plain words and nothing is stored. Accepted changes wait in the Release panel, the same one that releases changes uploaded from a phone, with anything worth knowing first. Release them there, and each phone takes the new version at its next sync.

A project takes one set of waiting changes at a time. While changes uploaded from a phone are waiting, Edit structure is read only and names who uploaded them: release or discard them first. While changes made here are waiting, a phone’s upload is refused with words naming who made them.

Retiring keeps a layer and everything in it, but stops new work in it. After the release, phones running an up-to-date Mapit GIS app show it on the map read only, and nobody can add, edit or delete its features. Edits a phone made before the release still sync and are kept. A WFS keeps serving it. Until the release, Keep it active undoes it.

A layer an earlier release retired has Make active again beside Remove. At the next release the layer takes new work again: phones can collect into it again after their next sync, and the features already in it are unchanged. Until the release, Keep it retired undoes it.

A layer is either made active again or removed, never both. If changes waiting to be released remove it, discard them first.

A layer can be removed only after a release has retired it, so it never disappears in the same release that stops people collecting into it. At the next release the layer and its features leave the project and every phone at its next sync. It cannot be undone, so export the project first if you want a copy.

Before you confirm, the page shows who collects in the project and when each last synced. Anyone who has not synced since the layer was retired may still hold edits for it. Those arrive after the removal and are kept as conflicts on the project’s Conflicts page; nothing is dropped silently.

Nothing is removed from under something that uses it. A WFS that publishes only this layer, or a web map that draws it, must be dealt with first, and the page lists them with the way out. A WFS of the whole project simply stops listing the layer. To confirm, type the layer’s name.