As we continue to add more pre-built activities to our library in Geocortex Workflow 5, we thought we’d take some time today to drill down on one in particular that has a lot of different uses: Geoprocessing.
The geoprocessing widget in Web AppBuilder for ArcGIS® has a few out-of-the-box options that can be leveraged quite simply, but if you’re wanting to add additional functionality that goes beyond those capabilities, you’re going to need to resort to custom code, which willrequire a lot more effort to deploy.
In this week’s Geocortex Tech Tip, we’ll explore the geoprocessing activity in Geocortex Workflow 5, how it can extend your geoprocessing tasks without the need for custom development. We’ll also take a look at some of the many different configuration options it has, and how simple it is to add this (and other Geocortex workflows) to Web AppBuilder.
Enjoy!
Video Transcript
“Hi, my name is Paul Van Haaren and I am the Technical Marketing Lead here at Latitude Geographics.
Today, we are going to look at using the geoprocessing activities found within Workflow Designer and show you how easy it is to run these tasks within Web AppBuilder for ArcGIS.
Let’s get started!
Here we are at Web AppBuilder for ArcGIS.
What I’m going to do first is just simply walk through the experience of adding the out-of-the-box geoprocessing widget that comes with Web AppBuilder and compare that with adding a Geocortex Workflow that contains the geoprocessing activity.
I’m just going to go ahead and add the out-of the-box geoprocessing widget first and to show that experience here.
It’s going to ask for the URL. I’m just using the message in a bottle service that Esri offers, it’s a very simple example.
I can validate it, it looks good.
So, here are some options that we have, these are just out-of-the-box options that are available using this widget. We have some labels, a tooltip and here’s our options that we can choose from to kind of feed the widget, its data.
I can choose a point on the map, provide a shapefile, select a layer on the map where I can configure it, a URL feature set.
I’m just going to choose a point on the map that is the easiest here.
We also have the ability to change the day. This is just the message in a bottle kind of experience where you choose the number of days that you want the bottle to travel basically. I can change that default value as well. That’s really it, that’s what comes with the widget itself.
I’m just going to click “OK” and there it is, it’s added.
Anything beyond this is going to be custom code and it’s going to require a little bit more effort to make changes or to add additional functionality that you’d like to see.
Especially in this example, this doesn’t do a lot, but it is quite valuable if you add some cool tools.
The easiest way to do that is to use Geocortex Workflow.
I’m just going to show you the experience of adding Geocortex Workflow to Web AppBuilder.
We’ve added the widgets here, then “Choose Workflow” and I am just going to use the message in a bottle sample and hit “OK”.
It’s added here, and we could see it running. Just showing you that it is very similar to what the out of the box geoprocessing widget is right now.
The idea here is that what I want to show you is the amount of options that you have to configure this.
This is the basic example, but here’s the workflow itself and to give you an idea. Here’s the display form that we were first prompted with and here’s all of our options that we have to choose from to kind of configure this.
We have options to choose a time picker, list box, file picker, add some images – all of this is just the display format that is initially shown.
The image captures the information and then we have in our try. What we’re doing is running the geoprocessing request here.
This is obviously a try catch, so it doesn’t work, it’s going to provide an error message, or you are prompt to fix the problem that you you’ve run into, things like that. It just doesn’t fail without any kind of warning, it kind of gracefully fails for you.
That’s the kind of thing you can do. You can imagine too in this Workflow, if I run it here, I’m just going to add a location here. Submit just a little note here too, you can change the symbology as well, the workflow allows you to change that symbol to whatever you want pretty easily.
You can imagine in a real-world example, if you wanted to sort of trace this line and do a buffer and select some parcels, and things like that.
Those are all things that you can do with Workflow that aren’t exactly easy to do without running your own custom code and you can run into difficulties with upgrades and things like that.
A lot of automation can be done with Workflow, as well and all of those things can be done within here and you have almost 200 activities here to choose from that all kind of complete various tasks and functionality.
It offers a lot of flexibility and changes made here are reflected instantly in your Web AppBuilder site. There’s no change, no need to recompile or anything with your code. The changes are made in instantly.
I just wanted to show you that this is just an easier way to run these geoprocessing tasks and add a little bit more functionality without a lot of difficulty.
That’s it for today. Have a good one!”
Interested in learning more about what Geocortex Workflow 5 has to offer? Visit our Disocvery Center and start building workflows of your own!
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