Geocortex Item Manager is a new web-based application that helps you manage items for both ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Enterprise.
One of the most interesting features with Item Manager is the ability to compare items side by side and see all the differences between two copies of the same file.
With that in mind, today we’ll break down how easy it is when it comes to comparing items in Geocortex Item Manager and how to find the differences quickly.
Video Transcript
“What’s up everybody, I’m Aaron Oxley. I’m a Technical Sales Specialist and in this tech tip, we’ll be looking at how to compare items in Geocortex Item Manager.
Item Manager is a new web-based application that helps you manage items, specifically ArcGIS Online or ArcGIS Enterprise items, like web maps and apps. One of the neatest features is the ability to compare items side by side and see all the differences between two copies of the same file or maybe it’s development test or production versions of an app you’re working on. That’s one of the best use cases, so let’s take a look together!
Here I am at the Geocortex Item Manager Welcome Page, and I’ll sign in to ArcGIS Online to manage my content there. If I wanted to manage content in my portal, I’d enter my subdomain and then sign in with this button but today, let’s use ArcGIS Online.
Now, I’ll sign in and the interface here is similar to our other designers, you might notice this bar on the left, and we have the app picker down at the bottom, the file menu here might also look familiar.
For Geocortex Item Manager, when it comes to comparing two items, I mentioned that one of the best use cases is to find any changes between a development or a testing version of an app and the production version.
I have these two files, Capital City Demo App is the development version of an application that I built and this is where I make my changes and I work out any issues before I push it to production, and this is the production version notice (prod) in brackets, this is the live version that’s available to my end-users.
I’ve made some changes in the development version and I want to see what changes are there since the last time I pushed to production before I do it again.
Now, to compare items, I need to enable Select Multiple then I can select two items and you’ll
notice that we now have a new set of actions over here. We can open the items in ArcGIS Online, we can rename or delete them but here’s what we’re looking at today: Compare Item JSON and Compare Item Data.
These tools analyze the underlying files, they find all the differences between the two
and then show the file side by side with all of the differences highlighted. So, any line that’s highlighted here is different than that same line in the other file, and the darker highlighting, it actually indicates the characters that are different. This would be what needs to get changed to make these files identical.
Now, most of these changes here are expected. In the JSON, we’re mostly looking at metadata, the created modified timestamps title things like that we expect to be different between these two versions. But if we come down to Compare Item Data, this is where we’ll find more material differences.
These first couple lines are different. Web map and web scene URLs are different
but that’s actually expected too. This is Geocortex Web app and Geocortex Web automatically makes a new copy of these for the production instance. It’s a built-in feature that makes it easier to manage your sharing and ensure data integrity, but that’s a bit off-topic. What’s important here is that I do expect these two values to be different.
Now, scrolling through works but on the right here, we have the highlighting also visible in
the scroll bar. So, we can come right down to this next item, and here we can see that it is a change in the toolbar; it looks like the buffer tool was removed or replaced with something custom.
Another neat feature, if I highlight this ID, the scroll bar shows me where there are
other occurrences of this text. Whatever I’ve highlighted, whatever I’ve selected here. So, we can scroll down, and here is the object.
We can see it’s a workflow, but the title is defined with this language value. I don’t know what that means but we can do the same thing here – I’ll highlight this value and I can scroll down to the next instance, I can see that that language value represents Advanced Buffer Tool.
So that’s a pretty good indicator, hopefully, that tells me everything I need to know, but if I’m still not sure, I can see there’s another instance down here – let’s come all the way down and this is the item. There’s the portal item URL.
Let’s grab the ID I’ll use Ctrl C to copy that and come over to ArcGIS Online, where we
had an item open earlier. I’ll replace that ID with the one that I just copied and we can go and look at this item in ArcGIS Online.
So, now we can confirm all these other details. Maybe it’s to make sure this is the right workflow, or maybe just so that we have all the information we need to provide some release notes on this new version.
If I really want to be sure I have the right workflow or get even more details, I can open it up in Geocortex Workflow Designer, but that’s getting a bit off track again.
The idea here is that Item Manager made it easy for me to compare the items and find all the differences much more quickly than I could with the regular tools.
What I do with that information is up to me – it’ll vary – but Item Manager has done its job it got me the info I needed.
So, I’ll stop there! That’s how to compare items in Geocortex Item Manager.
Now if you want to know more, just let us know, email info@geocortex.com and if this video was helpful for you, please like, share, subscribe and check out our other videos.
Thanks for watching!”
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