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

[peterNOTMEknoop]

Hi Owen,

Thank you for following up. As a matter of fact I just did another Map Journal workshop yesterday, and we are still seeing this issue occasionally, but not as often as in the past. 

Someone changes something on their map, such adding a feature to a Map Note layer or editing such a feature, and Save shows as disabled for the web map.  Panning or zooming around the web map, or toggling layers on/off, does not seem to help. They have to close the window -- loosing their changes -- back all the way out of editing the Section, save their story map if they haven't yet (which does work), and then re-load the browser tab. Otherwise, the web map's Save remains broken on subsequent attempts to edit the web map; once it stops working, you have to restart.

We didn't have time for too many attempts at generating the problem deliberately, and we were unable to find a way to reliably reproduce the issue. It does still have the feel a race-condition related issue though.  Some of the students who experienced this issue yesterday, are the ones who know their way around the best and are clicking through things the fastest.

-peter