Documentation

Connected platforms

Zone Forge connects to your operations platform through standards-based OAuth — sign in once, and the app handles authenticated upload, live status polling, and offline-safe retry on your behalf. Final partner list will be announced ahead of general availability.

Connecting your account

From the onboarding screen (or your account settings if you skipped onboarding), pick the operations platform you use and click Connect platform. You'll be redirected to your platform's sign-in page to sign in with your existing credentials and approve the requested OAuth scopes:

  • Read your organizations — to populate the org picker.
  • Read your fields — to pull boundaries and metadata.
  • Write prescriptions — to push generated maps back.

Tokens are stored encrypted at rest and refreshed automatically in the background; you sign in once and stay connected until you choose to disconnect.

The four-step upload pipeline

When you push a prescription, Zone Forge runs a four-step pipeline:

  1. Create file resource — registers the upload destination and returns a unique upload URL.
  2. PUT the zip — streams the validated shapefile bundle to the platform's storage layer.
  3. Finalize the resource — signals that the upload is complete and ready to process.
  4. Poll for status — watches the platform's processing queue until the prescription is VALID. At that point the layer is visible in your account AND the file is available to send to your equipment.

Each step is awaited and verified before the next is fired. If any step fails, Zone Forge keeps your prescription saved locally and surfaces the failure with the specific HTTP status and platform error message.

Ready for the cab — not just the screen

Every prescription is pushed two ways: as a map layer you can view and verify on your operations platform, and as a file the platform lists for wireless data transfer — so you can pull it straight onto your equipment in the cab without a USB drive. For John Deere, that means the prescription shows in Operations Center as a Map Layer and is selectable from the in-cab Files tab for Wireless Data Transfer. The visual layer is the floor; if the platform ever can't list the file for wireless transfer, your map layer still lands and Zone Forge surfaces a retry, so you're never blocked.

Your data stays yours to control. Zone Forge reads your organizations and fields and writes prescriptions back only with your permission. We never take ownership of your operation's data — it remains under your control on your platform, and you can disconnect Zone Forge at any time.

Shapefile requirements

Connected platforms have strict requirements on the shapefile format. Zone Forge validates these before upload so you never push a file that's going to be rejected downstream:

  • Projection must be EPSG:4326 (WGS84) — the .prj file is auto-generated.
  • Geometry must be polygons (no multipolygons with holes, no points, no lines).
  • Attribute schema must include Tgt_Rate_n (the primary application-rate column John Deere reads), Rate (a cross-vendor fallback for other equipment platforms), Product, Units, Zone, Acres, CostAc — auto-populated from the generated prescription.
  • Encoding must be UTF-8; .cpg sidecar declares the encoding to the platform.
  • All four files (.shp, .shx, .dbf, .prj) must be present in the zip.
  • Layer type must be PRESCRIPTION (not SOIL or YIELD); otherwise the platform may route the file to the wrong place.

Status polling

After the PUT completes, the platform's processing pipeline takes a few seconds to validate and ingest the file. Zone Forge polls the status endpoint every 1.5 seconds for up to 60 seconds, surfacing the status:

  • QUEUED — the platform has received the file, waiting to process.
  • PROCESSING — the platform is running its own validation.
  • VALID — accepted; the layer is now visible in your platform.
  • INVALID — rejected; the platform's error message is surfaced in-app.

Team attribution carries through

When multiple farmers, operators, or advisors are working under the same operations-platform organization, knowing who pushed a given layer matters — both inside Zone Forge and once the layer lands on the platform.

  • Inside Zone Forge, every saved soil upload and every saved prescription carries a small "By You" or "By Teammate" chip on the field-detail surface. The "You" variant is tinted so a teammate can scan a long list and instantly know which uploads were theirs vs someone else's.
  • Inside Operations Center, the uploader's name rides along with the push. Each map layer's description picks up a — by Robert Morris suffix, and an uploaded_by field is added to the layer's metadata. So when a teammate opens the same org in Operations Center, they can see exactly who pushed each layer without having to ask.

Identity comes from the uploader's Zone Forge profile (display name or first + last). If the uploader can no longer be resolved — a deleted account, a legacy row uploaded before this shipped — the chip and the platform metadata field are simply omitted rather than rendering "Unknown."

Partial-success recovery

Network blips, platform outages, and rate-limit hits happen. Zone Forge's contract with you is: your local prescription is never lost just because the upload failed.

If any step fails:

  • The prescription stays saved in your account's local store.
  • The saved-list shows it with a "Saved · upload failed" badge and a one-tap Retry button.
  • Retry re-runs the four-step pipeline against the saved data — no need to regenerate.
  • You can still download the prescription as a zipped shapefile and side-load it from a thumb drive.

Troubleshooting

Upload says INVALID — what now?

The in-app error includes the specific reason from the platform. Most often it's one of: geometry too complex (we'll prompt to simplify), out-of-bounds rates (we'll prompt to clamp), or a permissions mismatch on the destination org.

Platform connection required

Make sure your platform account has the right role for the organization. Org admins can grant access from their platform's settings.

Upload is slow

Most uploads complete in under 5 seconds. If yours is consistently slow, it's usually platform-side processing latency rather than your network. The status polling will keep you informed.

Manual export — download instead of push

Don't have a connected platform? Side-loading prescriptions from a USB drive into your in-cab display is a first-class workflow in Zone Forge. From any saved prescription, open the kebab menu and pick Download shapefile.

This is the same shapefile we would push to your platform over the API: same EPSG:4326 projection, same industry-standard column schema (Tgt_Rate_n, Rate, Product, Units, Zone, Acres, CostAc), all four files (.shp / .shx / .dbf / .prj) plus the .cpg encoding sidecar, zipped and ready to import.

Why download instead of push?

  • Older in-cab displays without over-the-air transfer. If your tractor predates cloud sync, you load prescriptions from a USB drive. Zone Forge's download gives you the exact ZIP your display expects.
  • You're between platforms. Use any in-cab system (AgLeader, Climate FieldView, Trimble, Raven) by side-loading the same standards-based shapefile.
  • You don't have a platform account. You can still generate, save, and apply prescriptions — just hand-load the shapefile.
  • You want a local archive. Every download is identical to what the platform has on file, so you can keep your own records independent of the cloud.

The download works on every saved prescription regardless of upload status — including ones that failed to upload, ones marked Local only in testing mode, and ones generated before you connected your platform account.