Troubleshooting

Solve common data upload issues in Felt with these troubleshooting tips and solutions.

ESRI Shapefiles

Shapefiles are a multi-file format, with each file containing some specific data. Three file parts are mandatory (.shp, .shx and .dbf) and, without any of them, your upload will not be successful.

A fourth component (.prj) is very common, and used to determine what Spatial Reference System should be used to interpret the coordinates in your data. If this file is not present, Felt will assume the coordinates are in latitude/longitude (represented by the EPSG code 4326).

Spreadsheets

See the Spreadsheets page for general information on tabular file formats like CSV or Excel.

Point coordinates

• Coordinates must be in latitude and longitude. Other coordinate systems, such as UTM, are not supported.

• Coordinates must be in numeric format, such as 40.7128 or -74.006. Felt cannot parse coordinates with text characters, such as 40° 43' 50.1960'' N or 74.0060° W.

• Coordinates must be in two separate fields.

Geocoding

See the Spreadsheets page for general information on how geocoding works.

• Context is important. Make sure either your address field contains all the necessary information (city, state, country, etc) or you have several fields with that information.

Geomatching

See the Spreadsheets page for general information on how Geomatching works.

Matching Threshold

Geomatching checks columns in your data for values that match codes or names in our available regions. If a column does not contain a majority of values that match, it will be discarded.

Duplicate & Unique Values

Geomatching works best with columns that have unique values. Otherwise, you might end up with the same polygon for California many times, superimposed.

To avoid that, the Geomatching process makes sure the amount of duplicate values (all values that are repeated at least two times) is under a certain threshold.

US FIPS Codes

Make sure your US FIPS codes (states, counties, CBSAs and census tracts) aren’t missing leading zeroes. FIPS codes always have a fixed nº of digits per boundary type: 2 for states, 5 for counties, 11 for census tracts, etc.

US ZIP Codes

Similarly, ZIP codes should always have 5 digits, so watch out for missing leading zeroes. Also, Felt doesn’t currently understand ZIP+4 codes, so remove the extra suffix if present.

Unsupported File Formats

QGIS Metadata Files (.qmd, .qgz, .qgs, .qml)

These files don't actually contain any data, just the metadata that defines a QGIS project (such as the style for layers in the project, references to the actual files, etc). Try uploading the original data files (Shapefiles, Geopackages, GeoJSON, etc) instead.

ArcGIS Layer Files (.lyr and .lyrx)

Similarly, the ArcGIS Layer File format does not contain any actual data, but a reference to another file that stores the actual data (usually a Shapefile or Geodatabase). Try uploading the original data files to Felt instead.

Enhanced Compressed Wavelets (.ecw)

ECW is a proprietary format developed by Hexagon Geospatial. Try exporting your data as GeoTIFF (.tif) instead.

URL Uploads

Maximum layers per upload

Felt will automatically try to parse and upload all layers from an Esri or OGC service. However, Felt has a maximum of 50 layers per upload. If the service hosts more than that amount, an error will be returned.

For OGC services, users can work around this by specifying which layers to request in the URL query parameters:

• WMTS and WFS: a single layer in the form of ?layer=X

• WMS: one or more layers in the form of ?layers=X,Y