topic Re: Drawing order not maintained in web layer in ArcGIS Online Questions

Drawing order not maintained in web layer

AvaFarouche — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 22:04:49 GMT

Greetings,

I created layer in ArcGIS Pro that enables drawing order, but when I shared it to web layer and add to an online map, the drawing order is not maintained.

It's not displaying because it's considered advanced renderer settings because I used Unique Values for symbology, but then grouped categories. Otherwise the symbology is simple, just different colored dots for the different categories. The thing is, I did this for essentially the same dataset for a different geographic area several days ago and it worked just fine. I guess I should count my blessings that it worked once.

What's the workaround? Resort to creating different web layers for all of the Unique Value categories? That means I'd be creating 7 web layers instead of 1 and adding all of them to an already busy map.

Any ideas appreciated! Thanks!

Re: Drawing order not maintained in web layer

DebapriyaPaul — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 01:51:09 GMT

Hi @AvaFarouche , thanks for posting the question.

Have you tried enabling the option to Display features by value order under the Types (Unique symbols) style options in Map viewer?

We could also configure Feature display order to define the order in which features are drawn on the map. It can be set on any numeric or date field in your data. To access the setting, open the Properties pane for the layer >> click Feature display order

Here are a few resources,

Overlapping features? Feature display order is here to help!

Set the feature display order

Hope this helps. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions!

Re: Drawing order not maintained in web layer

CalvinHarmin — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 13:12:14 GMT

When you say shared as a map layer, are you saying you created a map service, feature service, or did you create a hosted feature layer copy on Portal or AGOL?

If publishing a map service or feature service from ArcGIS Pro, you could potentially use the Symbology pane > Symbol Layer Drawing tab and set the draw order here, and I believe the map viewer should honor these draw settings. If publishing a feature service, it might warn you that not all advanced symbology options may function, but I think you can just ignore it in this case. Symbol layer drawing also lets you join/merge (or not) the sub-layers within each symbology so things blend together. But you can disable that function by changing Join to No Join. Feature Services sometimes simplify those multi-level symbologies so I think that's what it's warning you about.

Anway, by default, I think the ArcGIS* behavior is that draw order is done by ObjectID (newest drawn on top) unless these other strategies for draw order are configured. But I could be mistaken.