Data Layers

A data layer overlays your own point data — an interconnection queue, a retirement list, siting candidates — on top of the Worst Case TrLim results, beside the injection buses, constraints and harmers. Each one becomes a set of markers on the map, a section in the legend with a checkbox and a row count per category, and a table below the map with the same filtering, sorting and copying as the Constraints and Harmers tables.

New in v4.0.0

Authoring is GIPS Desktop only. Rows are written to overlays\<layer>.json and icons to overlays\icons\<layer>\, beside configuration.json, and Export GIPS Lite... / Export GIPS Pro... carry them along with everything else. Nothing about the WClusterTrLimSumJson.json format changes.

Two things are worth knowing before you begin.

The map draws a subset; the table does not. Nothing is clustered, so at a wide zoom more projects fall on a pixel than can be drawn and the map drops the ones that collide. The row that survives is the earlier one in the file — stable between redraws, so the map does not shimmer as you pan. The table below the map always lists every row, and so do the counts in the legend.

Hiding a column is not redacting it. A column you import but do not show is still in overlays\<layer>.json, which is served verbatim to every GIPS Lite and Pro browser. Untick it on step 2 of the import to leave it out of the file altogether. If a column is genuinely sensitive, strip it from the CSV before GIPS ever sees it.

Importing a data layer

In GIPS Desktop, open Settings, choose Data layers under Deployment configuration, then Import a CSV.... The wizard has seven steps, and each asks one thing.

Step	What it asks
1 — File	Browse to a .csv, name the layer, choose a preset. The Interconnection queue preset pre-fills the next two steps. GIPS reports the delimiter, encoding, column and row counts, and shows the first few rows.
2 — Columns & types	One checkbox and one type per column. Unticking a column leaves it out of the imported file altogether — the only control that does. The type decides how the column sorts, filters and formats. Import all, Import none and Restore cover a thirty-column ISO export.
3 — Which column is which	Identifier (unique; matches a table row to a marker), Latitude, Longitude, and Label.
4 — Icons	The column whose values choose the icon, then an icon per value. See Choosing icons.
5 — Table columns	Which imported columns the table shows. Identifier and Label are always shown.
6 — Popup fields	Which fields the marker popup lists, and in what order.
7 — Review	Rows to be imported, rows skipped and why, values drawing the fallback marker, and the resulting columns and popup. Copy report puts the full skip list on the clipboard. Import writes the files immediately — there is no separate Save for this pane.

Labels

Label is the popup title and the column each row's icon is drawn beside in the table. It is optional in two ways: choose None and the Identifier is used, which suits a file that names and identifies a row in the same column; or choose Fixed text and type a title — "Retirement Site" — that every marker in the layer carries. With fixed text the Identifier stays in the popup body, since it is then the only thing telling one marker from another.

Popup fields

The popup's field list starts out matching the table's columns and keeps matching it, so hiding a column in Columns... later removes it from the popup too. Rearrange the popup and the two become independent, which is what lets it carry a field the table does not show.

Skipped rows

A row is skipped when its Latitude or Longitude is blank or unreadable, when its Identifier is blank, or when its Identifier repeats one already seen. Skipped rows are counted and listed on the review step.

Coordinates near zero

GIPS treats a coordinate whose whole-degree part is zero as "no location", so a point within one degree of the equator or the prime meridian is reported as skipped.

Choosing icons

Each distinct value of the Icon by column is drawn with its own icon, and there are three ways to give it one.

• The built-in icons. GIPS ships seven generator-type icons — Solar, Storage, Solar + Storage, Wind, Gas, Hydro and Nuclear. Use built-in icons matches as many of your category values as it recognises, and it knows the vocabulary a real queue uses: Natural Gas, Combined Cycle and CCGT all find the gas icon, BESS and Battery find storage, Photovoltaic and PV find solar. It only fills in values you have not already answered.
• Your own folder. Point GIPS at a folder and it matches <value>.png or <value>.svg by name, ignoring case and punctuation — Solar + Storage matches solar-storage.png, Solar_Storage.PNG or SolarStorage.svg equally.
• One file at a time. Browse... on any row overrides that value with a PNG or SVG of your own. The three mix freely within a layer.

A value with no icon is not an error: it draws a neutral built-in marker, appears as Unclassified in the legend with its row count, and is reported on the review step.

Icon width applies to the whole layer and defaults to 24 pixels. Every icon is drawn that wide and as tall as its own proportions make it, so a column of them lines up in the legend and the table whatever shapes they are. An oversized source file buys nothing and costs memory in every deployment you export to.

The icons you choose are copied into the deployment, the built-in ones included, so renaming your folder afterward cannot break a layer already imported, and neither can a later version of GIPS changing which icons it ships. Built-in icons follow the theme — dark on the light basemap, light on the dark one — as does an SVG of your own that draws itself with currentColor; a PNG is used exactly as it is.

Refreshing a layer

Re-import... on a layer's card opens the same wizard, pre-filled with that layer's file, mapping, icon folder and column decisions. Step 2 opens with a summary of what carried over: how many columns stayed hidden, how many stayed unimported, and which are new.

Headings are matched by normalized name, so a punctuation change survives a refresh. A genuinely new column is always kept and shown, so a rename surfaces as one new column plus one previously-hidden column that no longer matched.

• Icons... opens the icon step on its own — the usual maintenance job, since a queue refresh normally adds a generator type rather than changing the schema.
• Columns... opens the same column dialog the POI, Constraints and Harmers tables use, so columns can be shown, hidden, renamed and reordered after the fact. It cannot remove a column from the file; that needs a re-import.

Removing a layer

The X on a layer's card removes it, deleting its rows and icons from this machine. It stops rendering everywhere the next time you export GIPS Lite and Pro.

Exporting never deletes from its destination, so files already in a folder you have exported to before will still be sitting there. They do no harm — configuration.json no longer lists the layer, so nothing draws it — but export into a fresh directory if you want them gone.

In configuration.json

Layers are listed in the userLayers property, new at configuration version 4.0. It is absent from every configuration written before now, and absent is the correct value, so an existing file round-trips byte-identically. The rows themselves live outside configuration.json so that a 5,000-row queue does not turn every Settings OK into a megabyte rewrite.