Sharing an item

Every item carries its own ACL. This page shows you the three sharing tiers and how to change them.

basic

Every item in GratisGIS has a sharing tier. The tier decides who can find and open the item.

Sharing has two layers, and it helps to keep them apart. Visibility is the broad question of who can find the item at all. Shares are grants to a named person or group, each with its own permission level.

Visibility: the three tiers

  • Owner only (default). Only you, anyone you share with explicitly, and org admins can see the item.
  • Organization. Anyone signed in to your organization can find and open the item.
  • Public. Anyone with the link can see the item, even without signing in. Used for shareable web apps and embeddable maps.

Visibility on its own grants read access. It never grants editing.

Shares: giving one person or group more

On the item's Access tab you can add a user or a group and choose what they get:

  • can view. Open it and look at it.
  • can download. View, plus export the data out.
  • can edit. View, plus change the item and its contents.
  • can admin. Everything except ownership itself.

So you do not have to hand over an item to let a colleague work on it. Add them at can edit and they can. Reassigning ownership is for when someone is actually taking the item over, usually because the owner is leaving.

Two further controls sit on a share once you have made one: a row scope, which can limit an editor to the rows they created themselves, and a geographic limit, which clips what they see to a boundary. Both are described in the sharing granularity reference.

How to change visibility

  1. Open the item's detail page.
  2. Go to the Access tab.
  3. Pick a tier. The change saves immediately.

What sharing does NOT do

  • It doesn't override file-system permissions. If a layer is shared publicly, its underlying PostGIS rows are readable through the API. Don't share a layer publicly if any of its attributes are sensitive.

Dependencies

If you share a map but not the data layer the map references, users who can open the map still won't see the layer. The Dependency panel above Sharing surfaces this: a yellow warning appears when the item depends on something less-shared than itself.

For forms, sharing is double-keyed: the form item controls who can submit, the paired data layer controls who can view submissions. See Forms → Sharing a form for the details.