Problems Editing and Saving Web Maps from within Map Journal Builder

[peterNOTMEknoop]

We are encountering problems saving web maps being edited within the Map Journal Builder. This has been happening since last November's update to Story Maps, which added the capability to edit web maps from within the Map Journal Builder. A fantastic addition by the way!

The symptom is that students open the web map editing from within a section in the Map Journal builder, then they edit something on their web map (e.g., add/remove a map note feature, add/remove layer), but the Save button is disable. If they select Cancel, instead of Save, then a popup appears telling them that they have unsaved changes in their web map. If they cancel that popup, then the Save button is still disabled. Selecting Cancel and then acknowledging the popup to close the web map editor does, as warned and as expected, result in their changes being lost.

The issue only seems to arise when we have a large number of students (20+) working on Map Journals at the same time. It seems to randomly affect some students and not others. If a student does cancel out (losing their changes), and then tries to edit the web map again immediately, then sometimes it works fine, others they still cannot save. Once they've run into the problem, they have also tried reloading the Map Journal Builder, however, sometimes that fixes things for a bit, others it still fails right away when they try.

To the best of our knowledge, this issue is only arising when we have 20+ people editing their own Map Journals at the same time during a class session. We haven't had reports of it occurring outside of class, when they are not all working simultaneously. During class session, the Story Map website seems to be very responsive, so we don't suspect any networking issues.

We have not found a way to reliably reproduce the problem. It has happened, however, both times we have had large classes using the Map Journal Builder since the integration of web map editing inside the builder.

Any suggestions you have for alleviating this issue would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks.

-peter

[GregoryL_Azou]

Thanks for the detailed report Peter.

We haven't heard or seen that behavior before, we are going to try to reproduce and will post our conclusion here if we found something. Couple of questions if you don't mind: what browser/system do you use? Students are editing their own map it's not one map that is common for all students?

[peterNOTMEknoop]

Hi Gregory,

We have experienced the problem saving web maps inside the Map Journal builder in multiple browser/OS combos: one classroom was Windows 7 and Chrome, and another was MacOS X 10.10 and Chrome or Safari. Not all students in each classroom experienced the problem. Also, in the Mac classrooms, students selected between Chrome or Safari, depending on their personal preference, however, there was no correlation between which browser they used and who experienced issue. So it really feels like something upstream is the culprit.

Each student worked on their own Map Journal.  Each student had one or more of their own web maps they worked on from within that Map Journal. Those web maps did all share six tile layers of historic maps in common. Each student also added their own Map Note(s) layer to their web map(s). 

We didn't notice any issues saving the web maps as the students set things up, and were following along as group. Once they had the framework in place, however, then we turned them loose, and that is when some of them started experiencing problems saving their web maps.

Also, we have done similar group Map Journal exercises since November 2015 in the same computer classrooms without issue. Those sessions, however, involved fewer students working simultaneously (10-15), and there were no feature or tile layers in common in those projects.

-peter

[peterNOTMEknoop]

Hi Gregory,

We'll be doing a similar Map Journal classroom exercise in the coming weeks, so I wanted to check-in to see if you had uncovered anything on this issue yet?  (If you want to coordinate any monitoring from your side during the actual activity, our next session will be 24 February with ~20 students authoring Map Journals on Rap & Radicalism around the world, however, they will not be using any feature or tile layers in common, if you suspect that is what caused the issues we saw with saving edits to Web Maps.)

Thanks!

-peter

[GregoryL_Azou]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for the update, no so far we haven't found anything but we are going to do more testing this week. To diagnose the issue I would need to be able to screenshare with the computer and optionally control it for a few minutes. If you have a screenshare software that would be great if you can connect me when the issue happen, feel free to message me at glazou - esri.com to arrange that.

Otherwise just let us know if this happened again or not, that would for sure help narrow the issue. Also when the error happen, if you can look at the developer tool console you may be able to screenshot a message to help me diagnose, see the following document that is very detailed, but you just have to open it and navigate to the console tab Navigating the Console | Web Tools - Google Developers

[GregoryL_Azou · Accepted solution]

Hi Peter,

We think have found what your issue was.

It appear that when you do the following the save button won't ever get enabled:

- make some changes to the map

- save the changes

- while the map is saving, the map editor will be frozen and let you know that the map is saving

- immediately after that dialog disappear, if you immediately perform an action on the map, like just panning it, the save button won't ever become enabled

This is very easy to reproduce and not related to web map content but depending on map content this may be more or less visible as the map may take longer to save. That fix will be deployed in ArcGIS Online on February 29th.

Please let me know if you think that's not it

[peterNOTMEknoop]

Thanks, Greg. That sounds like a plausible explanation, especially given the slight increase in save times we observe with so many students working at once.

During our session tomorrow I will warn students to be careful to pause a few beats before moving on, and to not do anything immediately after they save their map.  If we are still seeing problems that we cannot attribute to the bug, then I'll be back in touch.

Looking forward to the update!

-peter

[peterNOTMEknoop]

After asking students to pause a few seconds after the save process completed, we had many fewer occurrences of a unexpectedly disabled Save button.  There were still a few, however, it wasn't clear if the students had waited long enough or not.

Some students did discover that editing a Map Note feature's details would not enable the Save button. They had to slightly shift the map or change the zoom, before the Save button was enabled.  Not sure if that is a related issue, however, I'm hoping it disappears with the forthcoming release as well...

Thanks!

[GregoryL_Azou]

Thanks Peter, this is very encouraging. I confirm that the issue with save button not being enabled for map notes is going to be fixed with next release.

[OwenGeo]

Peter Knoop​,

Just wanted to check in to see how things were going after the last update to ArcGIS Online. Are you still seeing the saving errors or have they been eliminated?

Please let me know when you get a chance -- thanks!

Owen