Overview

Once you've got your Map Layer created, using the 'Creating Map Layers' tutorial then there are a number of configuration options available to give you more control of the layer.

These options allow you to change the configuration for Columns within your Layer individually, giving you much greater control over your data.

In this tutorial we'll cover the following Column options:

• Search (whether the columns show in the list search)
• Query (whether the columns show in Info Click)
• Required (whether the columns are required when adding or editing features)
• Public (whether the columns show in Public Maps)
• Link (a configuration to turn Columns into hyperlinks)

These options are found in the Admin Panel. To access the Admin Panel:

1. Click the Cog in the top right of the Parish Online software
2. Click Administration
3. Once in the Admin Panel, click My Layers
4. Select the layer you want to configure
5. Click Columns

Although all these features have quite different uses within Parish Online, we've put them in one convenient place so anything related to the layers can be configured here.

Compatibility

These features are the same in all XMAP or Parish Online variants. Accessing them (using the stepped guide above) is largely the same, but some Admin Panels are slightly different so whilst the functionality is all identical, you might have a different Admin Panel interface to the screenshots and videos for these options.

Search

We're starting off with probably the least-used layer configuration, but still it's one that some of ourusers find useful.

When ticked ON the column will be available as a search filter criteria in the List View.

When ticked OFF the column will not be available as a search filter. In the example below I have only ticked off the 'Emergency Contact' column so the other two still show.

Query

This options defines whether a column is displayed when an object is Info Clicked.

When ticked ON it will show as normal in the Info Click

When ticked OFF the column will be hidden from Info Click. In the example below I have switched off two of the columns, so only one shows in the Info Click.

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you hide a column from the Info Click, this also hides it when you go to edit the layer.

Required

This allows you to choose whether a a column mustbe populated when creating or editing an object, if if it's optional. This is great if you've got multiple users adding to a layer and you want to ensure they enter information into the columns that are important for you.

When ticked ON, you must enter a value when creating or editing an object in that layer.

When ticked OFF it means adding information into a column field is optional.

When it's ticked but greyed out it means the layer has class-based styling using that column. It's ticked on and greyed out to stop you from adding a feature that doesn't have a valid style.

If you remove class-based styling then that greyed out box will be an option you can change again.

Be careful when selecting the Query and Required options because if you do something like the example below, you're saying that the user MUST put in an Emergency contact. This is impossible because they won't be able to see the Emergency Contact column, meaning they'll not be able to save their feature. The result is very sad and confused users.

Public

This defines whether the column value is visible in any Public Maps. This is great for using Parish Online to store as much private information as you want (names, emails, phone numbers etc), and you want to share the layer in a Public Map, but you want to hide the sensitive information.

When ticked ON the column will be visible in the Public Map Info Click

When ticked OFF the column will be hidden. In the example below the Volunteer Assigned is hidden.

Link

This allows you to turn a column into a Hyperlink. There are quite a few configuration option for how the hyperlink is constructed.

When ticked ON the column will turn into a hyperlink, defined by options described below.

When ticked OFF the column is just a normal column as it usually is.

Hyperlink Options

Each column has an options pop-up for configuring how the hyperlink behaves. This can be accessed from the 'three dots' button alongside the tick box.

There are three options for the hyperlink:

• Use Column Value
• Static
• Dynamic

Use Column Value

This will turn the text stored in the column into a hyperlink. You should only use this if your column already contains a full hyperlink, e.g.https://www.parish-online.co.uk. It will look like this below.

So if you add different hyperlinks into different objects (maybe to reference a planning application page, for example), you can use the 'Use Column Value' setting to turn all of these into hyperlinks.

Simply open the dialog box and click Confirm.

Static

With the Static option, you can set one hyperlink to be used for all objects. So no matter what is in a column, it will always go to the hyperlink you specify.

Dynamic

Dynamic hyperlinks allow you to create a hyperlink based on the text you have stored in a column.

For example, if a column in one of your features had the value "hello" in it, you could create a dynamic hyperlink that was prefixed with "https://www.google.com/search?q=" and would then append "hello" onto the end. So when you click the column, it will do a google search for "hello".

E.g.https://www.google.com/search?q=#confirmed_by_council#

You can also use the Link Title so you can choose what it actually displays.

(the confirmed by council value is "yes" so opens this in a new browser.

You can use this feature to dynamically generate hyperlinks using the data stored in your features.