You hear us talk a lot about the importance of keeping your end-users in mind when developing GIS tools and applications; we built Geocortex Workflow 5 to help you improve user experience by allowing you to guide end-users through complex business processes in simple, intuitive ways, which is largely achieved through forms for capturing user inputs.
The improved forms offered with Geocortex Workflow 5 go beyond just simple text inputs; you can present users with checkboxes, dropdown menus, and geometry and file pickers. In this Geocortex Tech Tip, Ryan shows you how to get started and build your first form for deployment inside Geocortex or Web AppBuilder for ArcGIS.
Video Transcript
“Hi, I’m Ryan, and I’m a Product Manager at Latitude. Today I’m going to show you how to get started and build your first form with Geocortex Workflow 5. Let’s get started.
One of the main uses of [Geocortex] Workflow is to create an experience that guides the end-user through some sort of business process. Typically, what that means is that we are presenting forms to the user so that we can capture inputs from them, then pass on to the rest of our workflow, which actually executes the business logic based on the data the user provided. So, an indispensable tool in [Geocortex] Workflow is the “display form” activity, available here in the tool box.
To get started, just drag [the “display form” activity] onto the design area and connect it to the flow chart. Now we have a workflow that contains one “display form” activity. If I double click that activity, it opens the form designer experience. We can see here that I have a header that contains my title, and a footer that’s got some buttons in it for “submit” and “cancel”. So that’s what we have by default.
I can change the title of the form if I want to “My form”. And if I wanted to, I could change the buttons around to “back” and “next” instead of “submit” and “cancel” or add and remove buttons as needed.
And then we’ve got a selection of form inputs that we can choose from, depending on what type of information we need to capture. So, just starting with something simple, a textbox, we can drag that onto the [design area]. And let’s say that we wanted to create an address entry form. I can change that textbox’s title to just be “address”. And if I want a little description underneath that, I could put something like “enter an address” in there and it shows up.
There’s even some cool things that we can support, like markdown, to make it have some improved formatting. If I wanted bold or italics, or things like that, that’s available. And I can supply a value.
Okay, so that’s sort of a basic input that we’ve fleshed out. There’s also all kinds of other things that we can add. If I wanted radio groups or check box groups, dropdown lists, all sorts of things are possible in here. And even things like a geometry picker is going to allow the end-user to draw a shape or multiple shapes on the map. File pickers can [also be used to] capture pictures from phones and things like that. All these different items are available in here.
So now what we do is, I’m going to hit “Ctrl+S” to save this and am going to demonstrate this form running in our sandbox application. So, we can see this workflow running with various Esri APIs – in this case just a 2D map. Here’s the form showing up, as it was designed. There’s my text input, I’ve got radio buttons that we didn’t bother to configure, I’ve got a geometry picker that’s going to allow me to draw a shape on the map. All that information is available just from that, the simple clicks that set-up that form.
And the last thing I’ll show here is a couple real applications. This is just a sandbox for testing, but if we were to look at WebApp Builder [for ArcGIS], I can connect to a widget that’s going to run that workflow.
Here’s that exact same form running from the workflow I just edited, available here. That’s a 2D Web AppBuilder for ArcGIS application, and then here’s a 3D one that runs a completely different viewer and a completely different layout that’s being used, but it runs just the same, so we can get our forms rendered and we can start capturing input.
That [should be] enough to get you started. Stay tuned for future [Tech Tips] where we look at how we can get this data out of the form and pass it on to our workflow process.”
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