April 18, 2019

Integrating Workflows into Geocortex Mobile [Geocortex Tech Tip]

One of the many exciting things about Geocortex Mobile is its ability to tap into capabilities from Geocortex Workflow, which allows you to build guided-end user interactions for virtually any business processes, including offline field data collection. Geocortex Workflow technology extends the capabilities of Geocortex Mobile to fit 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, we will demonstrate different ways that you can integrate workflows with Geocortex Mobile, and how those workflows can be used to customize the end-user experience.

Watch on YouTube.

Video Transcript

“Hi, my name’s Jeff. I’m a developer on Geocortex Mobile Viewer, and I’m going to show how to integrate your workflows with Geocortex Mobile Viewer.

Let’s dive in!

Alright, so I’m going to show you a couple different ways that you can integrate workflows with Geocortex Mobile Viewer.

We’ll start here with Mobile Viewer Designer. I’ve got this pre-canned app, so it’s just got a simple web map and one layer in it.

Now, let’s say I want to run a workflow from the “I want to” menu. I can click on the “I want to” menu over here, and then I’m going to hit add menu item.

I’m just going to add a pre canned workflow that I already have. So, it just gets the current position of the viewer, draws a thousand-meter buffer around that position, makes a query for the features and then shows them in the viewer results list.

If I go back here, in this command field, I can just search for the workflow and I think I called it “TechTip”, find nearby features and then I can configure the title. I’m going to call this, “Find Features”, and I’ll select an icon, something to do with features. That looks good.

I’m going to set this target parameter to “unknown”.

The reason I’m doing that is because this specifies where a display form will be shown in the viewer and since we don’t have any display forms, we don’t need to specify this. If we leave it specified, then we’re going to see an icon pop open in the taskbar, and we don’t want that because there’s no display forms.

I’m going to save the app and then I’m going to open up in Geocortex Go.

That’s my app there. You can see I’m on the network location services here.

So, it’s not very accurate. If I hit “I want to” menu and hit find features, hopefully I’ll just get these two features because I think those the only ones within a thousand meters.

There they are in the results list. You can select them.

That workflow is somewhat useful, but let’s give the user a bit more freedom here.

Let’s let them choose the area that they want to search for features in.

I’ve got this geometry picker in a display form and when the change event fires, I’m going to do the query again and then display the results in the viewer show results list.

I’ll save the workflow and then I have to go back here and change this parameter to taskbar, since now we have a display form, we need somewhere to place it. This is saying place it in the taskbar of the viewer.

Then I’ll go save and I’m going to go back to the viewer here.

You don’t have to reload the viewer or anything if you make changes to your app or the workflow. You just have to hit refresh app and then this will give us the latest version of the app in the workflow.

If I hit “I want to”, let it find features that should get my geometry picker. Then I can specify the area that I want to search for features in. I’ll specify this area and I get the three features in that area and their populated in the results list.

Next, I’m going to show you how to configure a workflow in the feature actions menu.

All right, I’m going to show you how to add a workflow to the feature actions menu. In the designer, if you go to map, you can see your layer there. If you go into your layer, you can see the future actions and you can add a new feature action.

Once again, I have a pre-canned workflow that I’ll show you in a minute here.

It’s called “Tech Tip Draw Range”.

I’ll change the title to “Draw Range”, and this command argument input here what does parameter is that it specifies which workflow input the feature is going to be mapped to.

Instead of context, let’s call it “Feature” and that’s all you have to do!

I’ll save the app and then I’ll show you my workflow over here.

In order to get the feature, you have to use the workflow inputs activity and then I’m going to create a feature with a geometry and I want to use the geometry of the feature that were inputting.

If I go get workflow inputs and then remember that parameter that we just configured was called “Feature”, so that’s what the input name is going to be.

In the mobile viewer, you get a list of features. We have to do features and then select index of 0. This will give us the one and only feature that we’re getting passed in and then we can go geometry.

It will convert it to a feature that can be used within the workflow.

What this workflow does is it basically just lets the user draw a circle of any given radius around that feature’s geometry.

I just got a number slider here and I’m just drawing a graphic on the map.

If I save this workflow and then I go open Geocortex Go, open my app here and here’s some of these features.

Let’s pick this one. You can see the feature actions now has a draw range option.

Let’s do that and you can see that this is our workflow here.

You can see that the workflow form is anchored in the taskbar. Even if I go away for it from it for a sec, I can go back and reopen it.

Let’s see what happens when I adjust this.

You can see there that I’m drawing a circle at the given radius around the feature’s geometry and it finished.

It goes away and that’s it!

That’s how you configure workflows in the Geocortex Mobile Viewer.

Thanks for tuning in!”