Spatial Lens Boundary Limits

When creating a spatial lens boundary, there are a few limitations to be aware of:

1. Maximum of 500,000 vertices per dataset
2. Maximum of 5,000 rows per dataset
3. Maximum of 50,000 vertices per shape

Spatial lens boundaries are also required to be public and must contain exactly one geometry column and must contain multipolygons.

If you run into a failed creation of a spatial lens boundary, you will receive a "Something went wrong" error message, followed by an error code. Failed Spatial Lenses will be removed from the Spatial Lens page after 30 days, resulting in a cleaner user interface.

Please reach out to socrata-support@tylertech.com with the error code if the reason is unclear.

Note: We currently do not support the ability to edit the list of Spatial lens boundaries. However, failed Spatial lens boundaries will be automatically removed after 30 days.

What if my file has too many vertices to serve as a Spatial Lens?

If you have a file with too many vertices to a work as a spatial lens, you can try reimporting your data and applying a Simplify or a Simplify-Preserve-Topology transform to the column of your geometric data. These transforms will allow you to import the data but store it with a reduced number of vertices.  It may take some trial and error to determine the optimal number of vertices per polygon or multipolygon to make your shapes look good and still work as a Spatial Lens, but it is an alternative to finding a different file.

Here is an example of a Simplify transform placed on a column called the_geom in a multipolygon dataset imported from a shapefile, setting a limit of 2400 vertices per row. 

simplify(
to_multipolygon(`the_geom`),
2400
)

This was sufficient to import the most complicated shape in the set of 411 rows, yet still come in under the 500,000 vertices/dataset limit. This is because most of the shapes were far simpler, with fewer vertices than 2400.