ui-profiles.md

UI Profiles & Data Source Filtering

GeoLibre can hide data sources, web services, and plugins to simplify the interface for beginners or to standardize a deployment across a team. Hiding is non-destructive — nothing is removed, and any item can be re-enabled at any time. Profile preferences are stored locally in the browser/app and never travel inside a saved .geolibre.json project.

!!! tip "Looking to lock a deployment down?" Profiles declutter; the user can undo them. To pin what a deployment is permitted to do — a kiosk, a classroom instance — see Deployment Capabilities, which is never surfaced in the UI. The two are independent and can be combined.

For users

Onboarding

By default GeoLibre starts on the Advanced interface — everything visible — and does not show a first-launch welcome dialog. Choose a simpler experience level at any time from Settings → Interface (see below):

• Beginner — only the essential data sources and tools.
• Intermediate — common data sources, services, and plugins.
• Advanced — everything GeoLibre offers (the default).

An administrator can pre-configure the interface in the primary deployment.json policy, or use the legacy admin-profile.json fallback described below.

Settings → Interface

The interface is controlled by a single four-state selector:

• Beginner / Intermediate / Advanced are developer-curated presets. Selecting one applies its layout immediately. Advanced reveals everything, so it is the full, unrestricted interface.
• Custom activates automatically the moment you hand-edit any item below; it is a status, not a button you click.

Open Settings → Interface to:

• Pick an experience level, which fills the checklists from each item's complexity and takes effect at once.
• Check or uncheck individual data sources, plugins, whole menus (Project, Edit, View, Add Data, Processing, Controls, Plugins, Help), and the items within the Project, Edit, View, Processing, Controls, Settings, and Help menus. Editing any item switches the selector to Custom.
• Export the profile, with the language, layout, and accent theme, to an interface file, or Import one from a file or a URL to apply a colleague's setup. See Settings → Interface.

The Settings menu itself, and its Language / Layout / Interface entries, are always shown so the profile UI can never be hidden away.

For administrators

Use the interface section in the primary deployment policy. For example:

{
  "version": 1,
  "interface": {
    "enabled": true,
    "level": "intermediate",
    "lock": true,
    "hiddenDataSources": ["postgres", "video"],
    "hiddenPlugins": ["maplibre-gl-geoagent"]
  }
}

The interface field table below describes this section. Provision it at <base>/deployment.json for web/embed, the desktop config directory, or as a Docker source policy.

Legacy: admin-profile.json — still honoured

The legacy file remains a fallback when the selected deployment policy has no non-empty, valid interface section. Its unwrapped format is:

{
  "enabled": true,
  "level": "intermediate",
  "lock": true,
  "hiddenDataSources": ["postgres", "video"],
  "hiddenPlugins": ["maplibre-gl-geoagent"]
}

For web/embed, serve it from the application root. On desktop, the original file remains at <app_config_dir>/admin-profile.json; see the standard Tauri config paths. A present desktop file is authoritative even if malformed, and does not fall back to the bundled copy. Only an absent file or a failed read/command selects the web copy.

Interface fields

The primary interface object and the legacy admin-profile.json file share these profile fields; the legacy file stores them at top level.

Field	Type	Meaning
enabled	boolean	Whether filtering is active. Defaults to true.
level	"beginner" | "intermediate" | "advanced"	Seeds the hidden lists from each item's tier. Optional.
lock	boolean	When true, users cannot change the profile from Settings. To release the lock on the next launch, remove or clear interface.lock in the selected deployment policy, or the top-level lock in the legacy profile.
hiddenDataSources	string[]	Explicit data-source ids to hide. Overrides the preset when present.
hiddenPlugins	string[]	Explicit plugin ids to hide. Overrides the preset when present.
hiddenMenus	string[]	Top-level menu ids to hide (project, edit, view, addData, processing, controls, plugins, help).
hiddenMenuItems	string[]	Menu-item ids to hide (e.g. processing.raster, help.diagnostics, controls.minimap).

Data-source ids are the catalog ids in apps/geolibre-desktop/src/lib/ui-profile.ts (e.g. vector, xyz, mbtiles, postgres). Plugin ids are the stable ids defined in packages/plugins/src/plugins/* and packages/plugins/src/plugin-ids.ts (e.g. maplibre-gl-geoagent). Menu and menu-item ids are the catalog ids in the same ui-profile.ts (TOP_LEVEL_MENUS, MENU_ITEM_CATALOG).

When a level preset is active, external/bundled drop-in plugins (which load asynchronously after startup) are folded into the hidden set as they appear, so a beginner profile keeps hiding advanced plugins even when they load late.