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 numeric or date 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 numeric or date field.
If you don't choose a field, features in the layer are displayed numerically by object ID, with features assigned higher IDs displayed on top of those with lower IDs.
- Optionally, 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.