Cancelling a layout
How to stop a generation in progress — and what happens to your project when you do.
If you started a generation and need to stop it — wrong KMZ, wrong parameters, or you just changed your mind — click Cancel in the status bar at the top of the canvas. It's a plain button that appears on that bar while a layout is being generated.
Clicking it opens a short confirmation — Cancel this generation? with the note "You'll lose work in progress." — with Cancel generation to confirm and Keep running to back out. The cancel only goes out once you confirm. Layout runs are unlimited on every paid plan, so cancelling never uses anything up — you can just run the layout again.
What happens when you cancel
The cancel signal goes out
Once you confirm with Cancel generation, the request goes to the cloud. The status bar keeps showing the run as in progress for a few seconds while plots that were mid-calculation notice the cancel and stop.
Plots that haven't started are dropped
Any plot that was queued (hadn't been picked up by a worker yet) is marked cancelled. No compute time is spent on those.
Plots already running stop at their next checkpoint
A plot that was mid-compute when you cancelled checks for the cancel signal at the next safe point and exits. Anything it had already computed is discarded — no partial result is shown on the canvas. This usually happens within seconds; on very large plots it can take up to a minute.
Nothing is used up
Layout generation runs are unlimited on every paid plan, so cancelling costs you nothing — there's no per-run or per-layout charge to refund. Cancel as often as you need and re-run when you're ready.
(If you're on the Pro Plus Trial, the trial gives you 5 full calculations to try the complete workflow. Cancelling a trial run does not consume one of those 5 — only a layout you let finish does.)
The Inspector returns to its idle state
The pinned action area swaps back to Generate layout again with a summary line showing Cancelled — N of M done before stop. The parameters you had set are preserved. Your KMZ and project state are unchanged. You can edit parameters and generate again immediately.
When NOT to cancel
If only one plot has a problem and the others are fine, you don't need to cancel the whole layout. Let it finish — the Inspector will mark the failing plot as failed and show 5 of 6 done in 12s — 1 failed (the elapsed time appears after "done"). You can keep the partial result, or click Generate layout again to re-try the whole project.
Once every plot has finished computing, the status bar (and its Cancel button) goes away on its own as SolarLayout merges the results and draws the layout. At that point there's nothing left to cancel — the heavy compute is over and the result loads in a few seconds.
If cancel doesn't seem to work
In rare cases — a network blip, an app freeze, a cloud-side stall — the cancel doesn't land cleanly and the status bar sits on Run in progress… for longer than expected.
If you've waited a few minutes past when the layout should have been cancelled:
- Wait one more minute. Cloud workers check for the cancel signal at a few specific points; sometimes it just takes a moment.
- If it's still stuck, reload the page or reopen the project. Your project is saved to your account — the project, KMZ and parameters are all preserved.
- Any in-flight worker either notices the cancel and exits, or finishes on its own and writes a result that the cancelled layout will discard. Either way, layout runs are unlimited on paid plans — a stuck cancel costs you nothing, just re-run when it clears.
If this happens more than once, it's a bug — please tell us and include the approximate time and your project name so we can find the logs.