Editing as a team

A file can be your team's record

Groundwork keeps each person's changes apart, feature by feature. So a layer stored as a file in a Dropbox folder can be the record your whole team updates, with no spatial database behind it. Where you already run a WFS server, Groundwork edits through it instead.

On a Dropbox folder

Each time someone saves, Groundwork checks whether a colleague has saved the file since. If they have, Groundwork fetches the colleague's copy, adds this person's change to it, and saves that. One arborist updates a tree in one street, another updates a tree in the next, and the file keeps both. This works for new, changed and deleted features, and for the records under them, such as inspections.

Colleagues with the map open see each other's saves within a second or two. Each save is a new version in your folder's version history, so you can go back to an earlier one.

Groundwork checks each feature on its own, not how features fit together. So if two people redraw neighbouring boundaries at the same time, Groundwork saves both, even where they now overlap.

Dropbox is the cloud folder Groundwork saves to today. Maps from OneDrive and SharePoint are read-only.

The one case Groundwork won't combine

Groundwork won't combine two different changes to the same feature, even when each person changed a different field. That takes two arborists updating the same tree before either sees what the other did. If it does happen, the folder keeps the first person's change. Groundwork tells the second person their change wasn't saved, and offers them the newer copy to enter it on. Nobody's work is written over.

Two people adding inspections to the same tree never clash. Groundwork keeps both. How Groundwork saves your team's edits in the Administrator Guide covers the detail, and what the second person sees is in the User Guide.

On a WFS server

Before Groundwork saves a change to a feature the server already holds, it reads that feature from the server again. If someone changed or deleted it since Groundwork loaded it, Groundwork saves nothing, and offers the person the server's copy to make their change on. Groundwork sends only the fields that changed, and the geometry only if it moved, so people editing different features don't affect each other.

WFS-T has its own way to keep edits apart: locking. The standard defines LockFeature and GetFeatureWithLock to reserve features before changing them. Groundwork takes no lock and checks each feature itself. Groundwork can write over a colleague's change only if they save the same feature between Groundwork's check and the save.

Which to choose