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Importing a project

Importing brings an exported project file into your Siter environment as a new project. This is the path for moving work between online and desktop, restoring a snapshot from a colleague, or recovering a project from backup. For the click-by-click flow, see the how-to guide: Projects → How to import a project.

Learning objectives

By the end of this lesson you should be able to:

  • Recognize what the round-trip preserves and what it does not
  • Anticipate the side effects on user permissions and sharing

What import preserves — and what it does not​

PreservedNot preserved
Features (geometry, type codes, attributes, explosives, relationships)User permissions and sharing assignments
Layers and layer organizationPending access requests
Criteria selections and settingsShare tokens
Result sets and drawings (snapshots, not live re-runs)Existing Analysis
Markup, to-do items, and notesThe Undo/Redo Stack
Relationships and Relationship Groups

The "not preserved" list is intentional — a snapshot has no idea what user accounts exist in the destination environment, so it cannot meaningfully replay sharing.

warning

After importing a previously shared project, you must reassign sharing and permissions explicitly. Plan for this whenever you hand off a project to a new owner. See Sharing. Not applicable in Siter Desktop

Starting the import​

Import from the Project Management page: Import or export projects (box icon) → Import project…, or drag the .siter-snapshot / .siter-archive file from your computer onto the page. Both routes do the same thing — a snapshot opens as a new project, an archive opens a dialog to pick projects. A file the browser renamed on download (project.siter-snapshot (1).json) still imports.

Import needs only the Project Read Permission — a Siter Desktop install with a read-only license imports projects this way to review them, and can run analysis on them. If the button reads Import projects rather than Import or export projects, you administer no projects, so its menu holds only Import project….

If the project's hosted imagery background isn't available to you on this server, the project still imports, with no background map selected and a warning.

After the import​

The imported project opens as a fresh project in your environment. Verify the import succeeded by:

  1. Confirming the project appears on the Project Management page
  2. Confirming criteria, default attribute preset, and feature count match the source
  3. Running analysis to confirm results match the source (small differences may indicate version drift in the criteria engine)
tip

If the newly opened project appears to have only granted you Readonly permissions, reload the page

If the project was previously shared, reassign additional permissions as desired.

Try it​

Export an existing project (see Export and import), then drag the downloaded snapshot onto the Project Management page to import it back into the same environment as a new project. Confirm:

  1. Features, criteria, and result sets all match the source
  2. Sharing is intentionally absent on the import
  3. Live analysis on the imported project produces the same results as the source

This round-trip is the cleanest way to internalize what the snapshot does and does not carry.

Additional Project Management fundamentals will be addressed in Module 9.