The Map Builder workspace
The Map Builder is where you build a map in ALIGN. It opens as a single workspace in your browser, with nothing to install. This page names each part of that workspace, and every part has its own page in this section.
How the workspace is arranged
Section titled “How the workspace is arranged”The map fills the center. A rail of icons runs down each edge, and every icon opens a docked panel between that rail and the map. Nothing floats: a panel you open pushes the map rather than covering it, so you always see what you are changing.
The left rail is where content and composition come from. The right rail is where you shape the selected layer. The header bar across the top acts on the map as a whole rather than on any part of it.
The left rail
Section titled “The left rail”| Entry | What it opens |
|---|---|
| AI Assistant | The chat that answers questions about your map or acts on it for you. |
| Layers | The layer stack: order, visibility, opacity, groups and per layer actions. |
| Data | Every way of bringing data in: files, web services, cloud formats, your Datastore and the Data Hub. |
| Gallery | The catalogue of everything that can live on your map: controls, widgets, layout regions. |
| Layout | The composition tree: which widget sits in which corner or region. |
| ToolBoxes | The analysis tools, from vector geometry to terrain, hydrology, LiDAR and imagery. |
| Settings | Map constraints, saving behaviour, appearance and your geocoding provider. |
Settings sits at the bottom of the rail, apart from the rest, because it applies to the whole map rather than to one piece of it.
The left rail shows one menu at a time: opening Gallery replaces Layers, and clicking the open menu closes it. The AI Assistant is the exception. It stays open beside whichever menu is showing, between the rail and that menu, so the conversation never moves while you switch. A menu you leave keeps its state: a half filled ToolBoxes form is still there when you come back to it.
The right rail
Section titled “The right rail”| Entry | What it opens |
|---|---|
| Style | The appearance of the selected layer: colors, symbology, labels, raster rendering. |
| Popup | What your audience sees when they click a feature of that layer. |
| Edit | Drawing and reshaping the geometries of that layer. |
| Widget | The parameters of one widget you placed on the map. |
| Attribute table | The table of the selected layer, docked under the map. |
| Diagnostics | Errors and warnings raised while your layers loaded. |
Style, Popup and Edit all work on the layer selected in the Layers panel. Select a different layer and the three panels follow.
What the two rails have in common
Section titled “What the two rails have in common”ALIGN follows one rule throughout: you configure off the map, your audience uses the map. A widget’s on map surface only ever shows what you chose to expose. Whatever a visitor changes there, folding a legend or switching a unit, stays in their session and never touches your configuration.
That is why the panels live in the rails and not on the map itself, and why Gallery (which widgets exist) is separate from Layout (where they sit) and from Widget (how one of them behaves).
The header bar
Section titled “The header bar”Where the rails act on the contents of your map, the bar above it acts on the map itself.
On the left, the ALIGN mark takes you home, then a trail (Dashboard, My Projects, this map) tells you where you are. The map’s name sits at the end of that trail and is editable in place: click it and type. Next to it, the menus hold the less frequent commands, and the cluster of buttons carries the ones you reach for constantly: undo, redo, search a place, zoom out, zoom in.
The magnifier opens a search box under the bar. Type an address or a place name, pick one of the three suggestions, and the map flies there and drops a pin. You can close the box and keep the pin: the magnifier shows a small pin while one is on the map, and reopening the box brings your search back. The cross in the box removes the pin. The search and its pin are a navigation aid for you as a builder: they are never saved with the map nor published. If you want your audience to search, add the Place search widget instead.
The rest of the bar is what you do with the finished map:
| Button | What it does |
|---|---|
| Save | Stores the web map in your Datastore. It reads Saved once there is nothing pending. See Web maps. |
| Opens the layout composer for a print ready sheet. See Printing. | |
| Convert to an app | Hands the map to the App Builder as the start of an application. See Converting to an app. |
| Publish | Puts the map online at its own address, for the audience you choose. See Publishing. |
Publish sits at the far right, next to your account button, because it is the end of the work rather than part of it.
Where your work goes
Section titled “Where your work goes”Your whole workspace is a web map: the view, the basemap, every layer with its style and popup, the widgets you enabled and where you placed them. Saving persists it to your Datastore, and you can reopen it at any time. See Web maps.
Runs in your browser
Section titled “Runs in your browser”The Map Builder runs entirely in the browser. That includes the analysis: the ToolBoxes execute as WebAssembly inside the page, so your raster never leaves your machine to be processed. Large imports and saved assets go to your Datastore, which is the one place your data is stored for you.
Built on GeoLibre
Section titled “Built on GeoLibre”The Map Builder’s map engine comes from GeoLibre, an open-source GIS application created by Qiusheng Wu and released under the MIT license. GeoLibre provides the map rendering, the data readers and a large part of the analysis toolboxes.
On top of that engine, ALIGN builds the workspace described on this page: the Geo-AI assistant, the connection to your organization’s Datastore, the Data Hub (indexed trusted data sources), widgets, the editing tools, the layout composer, publishing and hosting your web maps.
We are grateful to the GeoLibre project and its contributors. The licenses of GeoLibre and of every open-source package the map viewer is built with are listed in licenses.txt.