No, this blog is not about retirement planning or the weekly special at your local grocery store. However, understanding how to save a layer’s symbology and other settings in ArcGIS Online will save you time as you build your web GIS. While you can save both layers and maps, the controls are in different places and serve different purposes.
Layers and Maps
Layers are the building blocks of web GIS. Feature layers, imagery layers, tile layers, and scene layers are all examples of layers. Each layer is an item in ArcGIS Online and combines data with symbology, pop-up configuration, filters, and other properties.
To view layers, we add them to a web map. Like layers, each web map is an item in ArcGIS Online. Web maps have a base map and may have one or more additional layers.
Web maps can store many of the same properties as layers including symbology, pop-up configurations, and filters. Understanding when you should save these properties to the layer or the web map is key to a successful web GIS implementation.
Two Ways to Save
In the Map Viewer there are two places where you can save: in the Contents Tool bar on the left side of the map and under the options menu on layers that you own.
The Important Part
Save Map on the left side of the Map Viewer saves any changes you have made to the web map. If you close and re-open the map you will see that your configuration has been saved.
However, if you add the layer to a new map you will see that the settings you changed and saved in the map are not reflected in the layer.
In this case every time the layer is added to a map the layer will need to be symbolized and the pop-up configured. As a best practice we recommend saving the layer’s configuration to the layer itself by selecting More Options (the three dots under each layer in the table of contents) and then Save Layer at the bottom of the list. Note that this option will only appear if you are logged in as the layer’s owner.
Now when you add the layer to a map it is ready to use with no configuration needed for a neat, professional looking map.
Understanding how to save a layer’s properties will go a long ways to helping you build an effective web GIS.
This blog is an up date of a previous post where you can learn how to save layers and maps in the classic map viewer.
Hello, @Katie Thompson Great post! I still have a question though. We are currently building an open data site with many pages in the Czech language and we would like to have the English version as well. Using the option of cloning our site, translating pages to English, and then connecting them to the main Czech site still creates problems if I understood the guide right. Our header is more complicated than just buttons with various language mutations. We have apps button, analyses button, and so on… Names of all these are different in Czech compared to English, but the… Read more »
Hi Ms. Thompson,
Thank you so much for your post on this subject. Is this same tool (Site Translation) available for exposure in an AGOL StoryMaps site? Thank you so much.
Stacy Culpepper
gamt67@gmail.com
Hello Katie, I have a premium site that I want to clone and create manually translated pages for. I clicked on “Clone Layout”, but this did not create a clone of the site (or initiative). It did create clones of each hub page, web maps, web map applications, and dashboards The cloned items did not automatically include ” – copied,” the way I know they are clones is by creation date. All this is to say, I cannot add the cloned hub pages to the new site since there was not a new site created. In summary, it seems as… Read more »