Field Operations

Field Records is Aptli's map — where the physical infrastructure your team works on lives as geographic features. Draw points, lines, and polygons for real-world assets (poles, cable routes, service areas), organise them into standardised layers, colour the map by what's happening on it, and collaborate with your team through version-controlled, on-device editing.

You reach it from Field Records in the main navigation.

Core concepts

Features — geographic objects on the map:

Points — poles, equipment, buildings
Lines — cables, pipelines, roads
Polygons — coverage areas, parcels, footprints

Layers — standardised feature collections. Every feature in a layer shares the same schema (available properties, styling, icons). Examples: Utility Poles, Fibre Cables, Service Areas. Layers are versioned.

Schematics — relationship diagrams that model logical connections between features (not just proximity): network topology, capacity models, conduit fill. Versioned like features. See Schematics.

Imports — bring external data onto the map. GeoJSON, CSV, XLSX, and KML are processed in the browser; Shapefile (.shp/.zip), ESRI File Geodatabase (.gdb), Personal Geodatabase (.mdb), GeoPackage (.gpkg), DXF, and DGN are converted server-side. See GIS Imports.

The map's tools open as windows — floating, draggable panels you toggle from the toolbar. Each toolbar button shows an icon only while its window is closed, and expands to icon-plus-label (with a count badge, where relevant) while it's open, so you can always tell what you have open. A window can even be popped out into a separate browser window for multi-monitor work.

The core windows, always present:

Window	What it's for
Selected Features	View and manage the features you've tapped or lassoed; shows draft and uncommitted-change counts.
Search	Find records by name and fly to them on the map.
Data Transfer	Import GeoJSON/KML/CSV to the draft layer and review conflicts before committing; export visible, selected, or lassoed features (desktop).
Layer Manager	Show or hide layers, switch basemaps, set display order, and toggle the map's overlays and lenses (below).

Three more windows appear only when their feature is licensed:

Window	Requires	What it's for
Projects	Fulfillment	Project overlays, details, a work-order Schedule (Gantt + conflict scan), and a Resources demand/supply view. See Projects.
Layer Relationships	Network	Define and visualise connections between layers; run a network trace. See Network.
Builder	Builder	Generate fibre networks and service drops from the draw buffer. See Builder.

Alongside the windows, the Mode selector (the pencil) switches drafting modes — draw a point, line, or polygon, or select features.

Execution lenses — colour the map by what's happening

Execution lenses recolour existing features by their derived work status, so you can read the state of an area at a glance instead of opening records one by one. Turn them on from Layer Manager → Overlays; several can be active at once.

Progress — a graded ramp by percent complete
My work orders — the work assigned to you
Needs validation, Failing, Validated, Needs revision, Approved with notes — validation-state lenses
Unassigned — jobs no one is on yet

A separate set of presence lenses — Has job, Has schematic, Has site — highlights features that carry each kind of attached record. On mobile there's also a My route lens.

Versioned editing

Map features, layers, and schematics use the draft → submit → commit model:

Draft created → Edit on device → Submit → Conflict check → Version compressed
     ↓               ↓             ↓            ↓                  ↓
 Not visible     Local only    Pushed to    Merge or       Historical state
  to others                     server      resolve        preserved forever

Why versioned: it supports collaborative on-device editing over patchy connections, spatial conflict detection when two people edit the same area, batch redesigns, and rollback — and it keeps a permanent, compliance-grade history (versions are compressed, never deleted).

Version controls — Undo, Redo, Resync, and Submit — sit in the map toolbar and, on list pages, in the filter row:

Undo / Redo — step back and forward through the current session's changes.
Resync — reset the in-memory state and replay every recorded change on top of fresh server data (it re-applies your uncommitted edits, it does not discard them).
Submit — push all uncommitted changes to the server. Non-admins request a commit; an administrator approves it in the Version Approval Queue (Admin → Versions).

An orange uncommitted-changes badge on the Selected Features button counts your pending work. See Version Management for the full model — including Auto save to device, Working from device, conflict resolution, and Draw staging.

Direct edits vs. Draw staging

Two ways to change geometry:

Direct manipulation — quick in-place edits: drag a feature, tweak properties, delete.
Draw staging — complex operations (imports, reshaping, splitting/merging, batch creation) staged in a Draw layer before you commit them. Your selections load in blue; other users' conflicting drafts appear in orange (read-only).

Sections

Version Management — Submit, undo, conflict resolution, auto save to device, working from device
GIS Imports — GDB, SHP, GeoPackage, DXF, DGN and more
AI Assistant — chat, form-fill and list-filter, and mobile voice/photo capture
Schematics — model relationships and network topology
Mobile PWA — the field-worker mobile interface