Many layers have features that overlap or cover each other, making it difficult to see and interact with important features on the map. For example, in a layer of wildfires that occurred in a region, a severe fire might be obscured on the map by several smaller fires.
You can resolve this issue by setting the feature display order on a feature layer. This allows you to control the order in which overlapping features in a feature layer are drawn on the map using a specified field in the data. For example, you can choose a field representing the level of containment of each wildfire (as a percentage), and display less-contained fires on top of more-contained fires when they overlap on the map.
To set the feature display order for a feature layer in Map Viewer, do the following:
- Confirm that you are signed in and, if you want to save your changes, that you have privileges to create content.
- In Map Viewer, open the map containing the layer or add the layer directly.
- On the Contents (dark) toolbar, click Layers
if the Layers pane is not open. - In the Layers pane, click a layer to select it.
- In the Properties pane, click Feature display order.
- From the Order by drop-down menu, choose a field.
You can choose a numeric or date field to set the display order based on numeric or date values in the field. Alternatively, if your layer is styled to show unique value categories or predominant categories with the Display features by value order toggle button turned on, you can choose Style order to display features using the order of categories shown in the Style options pane and map legend.
If you don't choose a numeric, date, or style field, features in the layer are displayed by the default data order.
- Optionally, if you chose a numeric or date field, click the sort toggle button (
or 
) to reverse the top-to-bottom drawing order of features.For example, if you chose a numeric field and
is shown, features with lower numeric values are drawn on top of features with higher values. If you chose a date field and is shown, features with less-recent dates are drawn on top of those with more-recent dates. You can click Sort to reverse this order. - On the Contents toolbar, click Save and open
and click Save to save your changes to the map.