Geocortex Mobile now allows you to configure custom launch links to help your field workers quickly and easily access the apps they need, when they need them.
This allows your GIS administrator to save even more time by configuring powerful, versatile workflows in Geocortex Workflow to automatically run on launch, making it simple to deliver work orders and collect the data you need to drive your business.
To best demonstrate this, we wanted to focus today’s Geocortex Tech Tip on how powerful this can be. In the video below, you will learn how to create and customize launch links in Geocortex Mobile.
Video Transcript
“Hi, I’m Phil. I am a Software QA Analyst with the Geocortex Mobile team. Today, we are going to take a look at how you can create and customize launch links to make managing your field operations quicker and easier than ever. Let’s get started!
For today’s demonstration, we are going to look at the use case of a Dispatch Coordinator managing a damage assessment and repair field crews looking after electrical infrastructure following a large storm in downtown Montreal.
Our story begins as it usually does in your ArcGIS Online environment or your Portal Enterprise environment. I’m simply going to navigate to my web map that I’ve created for this purpose and you will see that it contains a couple of layers corresponding to reported damage locations as well as some polygons describing damage areas.
Once I have my web map created and configured, I’m then going to navigate over into the Geocortex Mobile Designer. You can see that I’ve gone and created a basic app, using some of our default template options. I also added a couple of additional things like a legend to help out my field workers.
Launch links are going to be used to either simply launch the app itself, but you can also configure them so that – once the app is launched – a specific workflow will configure immediately.
In order to configure that workflow, I simply navigate over to the ‘Services’ tab, I’m going to go down in the ‘Launch Link Workflow’ section, and from here, I can add one or many workflows that I want to be able to configure links for. Simply click on the ‘Add Workflows’ button, that pulls up the item picker. You can see that I’ve created a workflow already for this demonstration. Simply select that, it adds the workflow into the app and then all I need to do is hit ‘Save’ and then I’m ready to go.
To create the launch link, I simply go to the ‘Deploy’ section here, and at this point in time, I have the option to just create links for the development version of my app, or I can also make it the production version of my app.
Let’s push this through to production now that I’ve added in my workflow so that way everything is up in the latest and greatest app that I want to work with. Once it’s in the production stage, I can either generate the link immediately for a Geocortex Go app, but I can also create custom apps if I’d like to go that route instead.
Either way when I’m ready to get the links, I simply click on the little three-dot button, click on the ‘Get Links’ option and now we’ll see that I can add a little drop-down menu, which will allow me to select the workflow that I’ve configured before, and then I can choose whether or not I want a link directly into Geocortex Go, but then I can also generate links in case I’ve created custom apps. You’ll see that there is a little QR code at the bottom here as well.
For now, we are just going to stick to a generic Geocortex Go app. We’ve got a couple of options here at the right. I can simply copy the URL itself, or I can immediately leap into it. I’m going to copy it just so we can take a look at the syntax itself.
So, I’m going to copy that, and I am going to open up a new browser tab, and I am going to copy that in. There are basically four different tiers of links that you can create. At its most basic level, it simply launches either Geocortex Go or the custom app, that’s this little ‘gxm-go’ part over here.
At the second level, you can launch the Go app and then you launch the specific app you have access to that’s where this ‘?app=’ and this ID here corresponds to the web map from back in our ArcGIS Online account.
The third tier is to launch a workflow, so once again we add in a workflow value here, it adds in the corresponding ID generated in the Designer. So this way, when the app launches, the workflow will fire automatically, and then lastly at the fourth tier, you can also specify parameters or arguments to pass through to that particular workflow if you have configured it in such a way to do so.
These parameters are stored in standard JSON value key pairs. For example, if I wanted to pass in ‘Argument1’, I could simply put that in parentheses, colon, and then ‘Value1’. You can specify multiple parameters if you liked, so I could just keep on going through and adding all of my parameters until I have it configured the way that I want it to. This is optional though, so for the purposes of the demonstration, we are just going to stick with the standard app. So, I’m not going to specify any of these parameters and leave it as is.
The experience will vary slightly depending on whether or not your user is signed in at the time that they access the link. If they are not signed in, they will be prompted to sign in from the standard Go sign-in screen and once they’ve been successful at that, it will then launch the workflow inside the app that they are looking for.
If the user is already signed in, like I am, when you hit this button, it is simply going to launch directly into it. We’ll get into the app and the workflow that I want to see. Let’s do that now.
You’ll get a little prompt, there we go, it’s going to launch my locally installed copy of Geocortex Go, it’s going to sign me back in, it’s going to open up our demonstration app, and it’s going to go and fire a nice little workflow here, where I am prompted to collect some information. It’s greeting me, I’m going to do some simple responses like adding in a date, indicating what kind of hardware it is, the severity of the damage, and I can choose whether we’ve completed that repair.
Once that’s all done, I’m simply going to hit ‘Submit’, and then that is going to be reflected on the piece of work that has been assigned to me here, as you can see my changes.
These links can be shared in a variety of ways, you can store them in an excel spreadsheet, a word document, a PDF, you can host them on an internal or external website, you can send them by email, there is a variety of different methods that you can do.
At the end of the day, these launch links make it very easy for your administrator to pass along the exact work in Geocortex Workflow that your field crews need to do.
If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out, and don’t forget to like and subscribe to our channel as we are constantly pumping out great new content all the time.
Thank you very much and I hope you have a great day!”
Want to learn more about how Geocortex Mobile can streamline your mobile app development? Click the button below for more information, or to schedule a personal demonstration.
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