Presets & inheritance

Presets are Mapplic’s mechanism for sharing configuration across locations. The Presets guide covers the editor steps; this page explains the model underneath — what inheritance means and how values resolve.

A preset is a location template

A preset has exactly the same shape as a location. It lives in the map’s presets list and carries the options you want to reuse — a style, a marker color, a popup configuration. Locations don’t copy those options; they reference the preset by id and inherit its values live.

Change a preset once and every location pointing at it updates at the same time. That’s the whole point: define shared settings in one place instead of repeating them on every location.

Inheritance and overrides

When a location references a preset, Mapplic resolves its final properties by layering sources in order of increasing priority:

1. Preset values — inherited as the baseline.
2. The location’s own values — anything set directly on the location overrides the inherited value for that field.
3. Coordinates are never inherited — the editor disables coord and latlon on presets, so a location always keeps its own position. (Other Position fields such as layer and zoom can be inherited.)

In other words, a location is the preset, with its own fields painted on top. Leave a field blank on the location and it shows the preset’s value; set it and the local value wins.

The Default preset

Every map has a built-in Default preset (id def). Any location that doesn’t reference a custom preset inherits from it, which makes the Default preset the natural home for map-wide defaults — a base marker color, a standard popup type.

Why it matters

Presets turn repetitive per-location configuration into a small set of reusable types:

• A venue map with available / reserved / sold seat presets — change a seat’s status by pointing it at a different preset, and it inherits that preset’s color, style, and description.
• A store locator where every pin shares one marker and popup style.

This inheritance model pairs naturally with template variables; see the Presets schema for the data shape.