Editing boundaries on the map

Drawing a boundary means selecting census areas. There are three ways to select, and one control that decides how fine the areas are.

Turning selection on

Select a territory in the tree, then turn on selection mode. The cursor changes over the map.

While selection mode is on, clicking the map selects areas instead of opening territory information.

Choosing how fine your selection is

By default the map follows your zoom. Zoom out and you are selecting states; zoom in and you get counties, then tracts, then block groups.

The thresholds:

The map controls. Basemap, census area, city search and help.

To hold one size regardless of zoom, use the census-area control and pin it.

Auto follows the zoom. Pinning holds one size.

⚠️ A pinned size that the map cannot draw at your current zoom will tell you so. The finer areas are not carried in the map data until you are zoomed in far enough — block groups in particular. When that happens the control warns and offers to zoom you to where the pinned size is available. It does not silently select something else.

The three ways to select

Click

Click an area to add it. Click it again to remove it.

Click selection is answered in your browser, from the map already on screen, so it is fast — measured at well under 20 ms from click to visible highlight. It is also a preview: the authoritative shape is computed when you save.

Box — shift-drag

Hold Shift and drag a rectangle. Everything of the current size inside the rectangle is selected.

This is the fastest way to cover ground, and it is the gesture most likely to take area from a neighbour without you noticing. See What happens to a neighbour.

If the territory you are editing has a parent with a boundary, the rectangle is clipped to the parent — you cannot select outside it by dragging past its edge.

Lasso — the polygon tool

Turn on the polygon tool and click to place each corner of a shape; close it to select everything inside.

Use it for anything a rectangle handles badly — a coastline, a river, a wedge of a metro. It is slower per gesture and far more precise.

Editing at metro scale. At this zoom a selection takes whole counties.

Zoomed in, the same gestures select block groups.

Saving

Save commits the selection.

Three things happen, and it is worth knowing the order:

1. The areas you selected are fused into one shape. Interior lines vanish.
2. Any area that belonged to another territory is taken from it.
3. The boundary is live immediately. There is no draft and no publish step.

⚠️ The list of areas is not kept — only the shape. To change a boundary later you re-select and re-save. See The two hierarchies.

Saving does not re-assign anything

Records already assigned under the old boundary stay where they are. Changing a boundary does not move records; nothing re-evaluates them on its own.

To move them, open Assignment Exceptions, select the affected rows and choose Re-run after a fix. Records that were assigned to the wrong territory rather than to none will not be in that queue at all — they were assigned successfully, just under a boundary that has since changed.

What happens to a neighbour

The area moves to you, silently. No confirmation, no warning, no notification to the other territory's owner.

🔴 And if your selection covers all of a neighbouring territory, that territory loses its whole boundary — every bit of ground it had, in one drag.

Corrected 2026-08-13. An earlier version of this page said such a territory "is deleted — not emptied". That overstates it in a way that matters when you are trying to recover: the territory's Salesforce record survives, so the territory is still in your hierarchy afterwards — it simply has no map area left. You do not have to recreate it; you have to give it ground again.

Both behaviours are recorded as defects owed remediation. Until they are fixed, the practical advice is: before a large drag over ground that already has territories on it, look at what is there.

Clearing a territory's boundary

The control is called "Clear territory boundary", and clearing a boundary is all it does. The ground the territory covered goes back to Unassigned; the territory itself stays in your hierarchy and is still there after a refresh. Use it when a territory's area is wrong and you want to start its boundary again.

Renamed and rewritten 2026-08-17. Until this release the same control was labelled "Delete Territory", and its dialog warned that deleting was "permanent" and "cannot be undone". That was untrue — nothing was ever deleted, and the territory came back on the next refresh. The behaviour has not changed; the wording has, so that it describes what happens. If you are working from an older screenshot or an older note, this is the same control under an accurate name.

What to expect:

• It does not remove a territory from the model. Removing a territory from the hierarchy is done in Salesforce setup, not here. Nothing in the map application deletes a territory record.
• It can also clear boundaries beneath it, and it goes by area rather than by parentage. Any lower-level territory whose boundary lies inside the area you are clearing has its boundary cleared too. That is a geographic test, not a hierarchy one — so a child territory whose ground sits outside the cleared area keeps its boundary, and a territory that is not a child of this one but does sit inside the area will lose its boundary. Those lower-level territories also remain in your hierarchy.
• This second part happens in the background, just after the first part reports success. If it does not finish, you will not be told. If lower-level boundaries look wrong afterwards, refresh and check them.
• On a territory that has never been given any ground, you are told plainly that there is nothing to clear — "<name> has no mapped boundary to clear." Nothing is broken; there was simply no boundary.

⚠️ Clearing a boundary still destroys real work. The territory record survives, but the selection that built the boundary is not stored anywhere and cannot be recovered — you rebuild it by hand. That is why the dialog asks you to confirm.

Reading the map

Because map labels are not yet drawn, the map distinguishes territories by four things other than a name:

Hover a territory to see its name.

⚠️ Two things the design specifies that the map does not draw yet, stated so you are not looking for them: a diagonal hatch distinguishing a locked territory and a repeated palette colour (past 20 territories in one sibling group the colours wrap), and the same hatch over Unassigned. The patterns exist; they are not applied to these layers. Until they are, a locked territory looks like any other, and past 20 siblings two territories can share a colour with nothing to tell them apart.

A note on labels

Territory names are not drawn on the map yet. The typeface has not been chosen, and rather than pick one arbitrarily the name layers are left out. They will appear when it is chosen; nothing else about the map changes.

Until then, a territory is identified by colour, position, outline weight and hatch — which is why all four carry meaning.

Performance

Click selection is fast and does not touch the server. Box and lasso selections do, and their cost grows with how many areas they cover: a rectangle over a metro at block-group resolution can be tens of thousands of areas.

If a large drag feels slow:

• Zoom out one step and select coarser areas, then refine.
• Split the drag into a few smaller ones.
• The first large drag over an area is the slowest; repeats are faster.