Interactive Map¶

The interactive map provides a geographic view of your entire cable plant infrastructure, powered by Leaflet with marker clustering and layer controls.

Accessing the Map¶

Navigate to Plugins > Pathways > Map or visit /plugins/pathways/map/.

Map Features¶

Structure Markers¶

Structures appear as SVG markers with shapes and colors specific to their type:

• Circles — Poles, manholes, handholes
• Squares — Cabinets, vaults, pedestals, equipment rooms, building entrances
• Diamonds — Telecom closets, riser rooms
• Triangles — Roof mounts
• Crosshairs — Towers

Markers cluster when zoomed out and expand as you zoom in.

Pathway Lines¶

Pathways render as colored lines connecting structures:

• Conduit — Solid brown line
• Aerial Span — Dashed blue line
• Direct Buried — Dotted gray line
• Innerduct — Solid thin orange line

Layer Toggles¶

Icon pill toggle buttons at the top of the map control which feature types are visible:

• Structures -- Toggle structure markers
• Conduits -- Toggle conduit lines
• Aerial Spans -- Toggle aerial span lines
• Direct Buried -- Toggle direct buried lines

External plugin layers (if registered) also appear as toggle buttons.

Hiding Inactive Infrastructure¶

Below the layer toggles, the Hide inactive button removes features whose lifecycle status you consider inactive from every layer. The gear button next to it opens a small panel with one checkbox per status choice, defining the "inactive" set; the default is Retired + Abandoned in place. Both the toggle and the set persist per browser (localStorage), so the map remembers your preference across visits.

Filtering happens server-side: the layer requests and the /info count endpoint both receive the exclusion, so viewport counts, clustering thresholds, and what is actually drawn always agree. Circuit routes are not affected -- circuits carry NetBox core statuses, not plugin pathway statuses.

Hiding Unoccupied Infrastructure¶

The Hide unoccupied button below it filters the map down to plant that actually carries cable: pathways with at least one routed cable segment and the structures that terminate them. Occupancy is containment-aware -- a conduit whose innerduct carries a cable and a conduit bank with an occupied member conduit both stay visible. The toggle persists per browser, filters server-side like the status exclusion (so counts and clusters agree with what is drawn), and composes with Hide inactive. Circuit routes and junctions are unaffected.

Layer Density Gating¶

The map keeps the display readable by checking how many features each enabled layer would draw inside the current viewport. Every pan or zoom hits a lightweight /api/plugins/pathways/geo/info/ endpoint that returns counts and thresholds; the frontend then decides per layer whether to draw it directly, draw it with client-side clustering, or hide it entirely. Hidden layer toggles dim to roughly half-opacity and show the in-view count beside the label so it is obvious why the layer is not on screen -- usually zooming in is enough to bring it back.

Defaults (override in PLUGINS_CONFIG['netbox_pathways']['map_thresholds']):

When the structures layer crosses either threshold (client cluster or server cluster), the supporting infrastructure layers are suppressed regardless of their own counts: at that density a single highlighted line cannot be matched back to a clustered structure marker, so the whole set is hidden until you zoom in. Reference-mode external layers participate in the same gating, using their max_features registration value (default 500).

How the gating performs during panning¶

To keep the gating logic from making the map feel laggy, the frontend uses three zoom bands:

Set PLUGINS_CONFIG['netbox_pathways']['map_skip_info_zoom'] to raise or lower the skip-info threshold for deployments with unusual feature density.

Sidebar¶

Clicking any feature opens a sidebar panel with two views:

List View:

• Search field to filter features by name
• Type filter pills to show/hide feature categories
• Scrollable list of all visible features
• Feature count and aggregate statistics

Detail View:

• Full feature attributes (name, status, type, endpoints, dimensions) -- the lifecycle status renders as a colored badge matching the list views
• Links to the NetBox detail page
• Related objects (connected pathways, routed cables)

Hover Popover¶

Hovering over a feature shows a lightweight popover with the feature name. External layers can configure which fields appear in the popover.

Cable Trace¶

The map supports cable trace visualization. From a Cable detail page, the map panel shows the cable's complete physical route highlighted across pathways.

Controls¶

URL Parameters¶

Override default map position via URL:

Map Panels on Detail Pages¶

Besides the full-page map, a read-only map panel is injected into detail pages so infrastructure is visible in context:

The Location panel walks the location tree: viewing a parent shows the structures and pathways of its child locations too, matching how NetBox counts related objects on the same page. Each structure is drawn once even when several pathways share it as an endpoint.

Markers shown only for context are drawn faded -- on a Location page that means the far-end structure of a pathway leaving the location, so the location's own structures read first. A structure that is both in the location and a pathway endpoint is drawn at full strength.

Indoor pathways that run location-to-location carry no geographic path, so they contribute nothing to the map -- they appear in the Pathways tables instead.

External Layers¶

Other NetBox plugins can register layers on the Pathways map using the Map Layer Registry. External layers appear as additional toggle buttons and render with their configured styling. See the developer guide for registration details.

Configuration¶

Default map center and zoom are configured in PLUGINS_CONFIG. See Configuration.