Working With Groups

The Groups feature in DRA 2020 gives you the ease of sharing that you get by Publish-ing maps but restricted to a membership-based group — in effect, private publishing. Groups of people working together on redistricting — like the state chapter of an advocacy organization — can use a group to share maps amongst their members without having to pass around individual Share (“join”) links to maps.

Creating a Group

To create a new group, you press the New Group button on the Manage Groups dialog. There are two main ways to get to this dialog:

• Click on the Account icon in the upper right corner and choose Groups menu option, or
• Click on My Maps, choose My Groups, and then click on the Manage Groups button on the toolbar

Also, when you select a map in My Maps, a toolbar becomes available that includes a Groups command.

With the Manage Groups dialog open, click on the New Group button in the lower left.

When you click on New Group, you get the Edit Group dialog — you use the same dialog to create a new and edit an existing group.

Give the new group a name and a description, enter one or more email addresses for DRA users, and then press Apply. The users will be added to the group. They can choose to leave the group, using the Manage Group dialog if they wish. Alternatively, you can Copy the “joingroup” link and send it others via email.

Add or Remove Maps from a Group

Groups work very much like Labels, so to add or remove maps from groups, select the maps in My Maps and click on the Groups command on the toolbar. The Add or Remove Groups dialog will come up.

This dialog shows you all the groups that you are a member of and indicates which, if any, of those groups the selected map(s) is(are) in. As with Labels, simply click on the checkboxes and press Apply for those additions & removals to be applies to the selected map(s).

The Allow Edit checkbox is off by default which means that everyone in the group will be able to see the map & view but not edit it. Similar to Sharing maps, if you allow editing then everyone in the group will also be able to change the map.

If you are a member of lots of groups, you filter the list by entering a search string in the Filter Groups control.

Finding Maps in a Group

You can find the maps in a group by going to the My Groups collection. There you will see all the Groups you are a member of. To help you find maps, you’ll also see all the Labels on your maps.

When you click on one of these, the list of maps will be filtered to those maps.

You can also filter maps in any of the map views — e.g., My Maps, Published — using the ‘groups’ property (no quotes). For example:

groups:internal

would filter the maps to the maps in groups that contain the string ‘internal’. See Filtering & Sorting Maps.

Manage Groups

From the Add or Remove Groups dialog and the Groups option on the Account menu, you can open the Manage Groups dialog and change various aspects of existing groups.

For each group, you see:

• The number of maps in the group
• Sometimes a blue check — Groups that have already been shown to you in this dialog will appear with a blue check. If you have been just added to a group — either by clicking on a “joingroup” link or by being added using your email by some other group member — the blue check will be missing. This is the way you can identify new groups.
• An edit control (the pencil) — This brings up the Edit Groups dialog shown above where you can add more users to a group. If you are the owner of the group, the Edit Groups dialog will have a Manage Users button which will bring up the Manage Group Users dialog below that you can use to remove users from the group.
• A share control — This copies an invitation (“joingroup”) link to the clipboard so you can send it to others.
• A Leave Group button — Click on this to exit a group. If you leave a group, you can re-join it by either being re-added by a member or by clicking on a “joingroup” link again that a member gives you.

Note: You can leave a group, even if you’re created it. When you do that, the Leave Group button will become a Rejoin Group button. If you left the group accidentally, you can click on that to rejoin.

Manage Group Users

This is where the group owner can control and inspect group membership.

Please excuse the goofy sample groups in some of the screenshots: We took these in our development environment with the obviously fictitious groups we used to test the feature.