Project designer

The Project designer is for the organisation’s admin and managers, while the organisation’s subscription is active. Open it from Tools, on the Project designer card. It designs projects for the organisation you are in at the moment, the one chosen on Organisation.

The page lists the organisation’s draft projects, newest first, with when each was last changed. The same drafts are on Content, at the top, and Project drafts in Content’s Type filter shows only them.

You can also design from Claude or ChatGPT, once your admin allows it: they create the same kind of draft, here, for you to review and publish. See the Claude and ChatGPT connector.

New project asks for a name and opens an empty draft, to design by hand.

Start from an existing project copies one of the organisation’s cloud projects: its layers, their fields with their types, required and default values, and the pick lists linked to them. Nothing anybody collected is copied, no feature, photo or history, and the original is not changed. Retired layers and anything the designer cannot make are left out, and the page lists what was.

Explore the Survey Template Catalogue opens ready-made surveys drawn from public standards and field practice, across agriculture, forestry, nature, marine, engineering, utilities, cadastral, energy and more. Search them, or filter by sector and region. Each template’s page shows its layers and fields, the standards it follows, how far it has been checked against them, and its sources. Use this template makes a draft exactly as the template is, with its pick lists if you leave them ticked. Check a template against your own copy of the standard before relying on it.

A draft opens in the same editor as Edit structure. Add layers of points, lines or polygons, and fields of six types: Text, Integer, Decimal, Yes/No, Date, and Date & Time. Text and number fields can be required, and any field can have a default.

Every layer already has a Name field and two date columns, mapit_created_date and mapit_updated_date, which the app fills in on every save. The app also gives every feature a fid and a uuid. They are shown greyed out, or named under the list, so there is no need to add fields of your own for them.

Your work is saved as you make it. Leave and carry on later from Content or the Project designer: every admin and manager sees the same draft, and no crew sees anything until you publish.

A pick list gives a field a fixed set of values to choose from on the phone. In a draft they are on the Pick lists card. Each one is an attribute set that goes inside the project when you publish, already linked to its fields, so crews link nothing by hand. A field linked to one shows a link icon in the editor.

• Edit values lists each field’s values, one a line, and its default. Save to draft saves every field of the list together.
• Save to my Content keeps a copy as your own attribute set, to use in other projects. From then on it is changed in the Attribute designer, and that copy is what the project gets.
• Remove from draft takes the list out after you confirm. Its fields stay, without a list to pick from.

Nothing is saved to your Content unless you ask. A field takes a pick list of its own kind: text fields take text, multi-select or barcode lists, Integer fields whole numbers, Decimal fields numbers; Yes/No and date fields take none.

Where Design with AI appears on a draft, you can describe the survey in your own words. The designer asks a few questions, with answers to tap, then proposes layers and fields. Nothing changes until you press Use this structure; after that it offers pick lists for the fields with choices, which you add with Add these pick lists. Ask it for changes at any point, such as another field: it asks what kind of data the field holds, and the draft’s pick lists are kept.

It sees what you type and the draft’s structure, never anything your crews collect, and it runs in the EU. Whether the organisation uses it is its admin’s decision: AI tools on Organisation, Settings turns it off for everybody.

Publish project creates the project for the organisation, private until you share it with the crew from Content. Adding a project on the portal says what it checks and what happens next, and Changing a project’s structure how a published project changes later.

Delete on a draft asks you to confirm. It also offers to remove attribute sets saved to your Content for that draft, when they are still private to you and no other draft uses them. Shared sets are never removed.