Whether you are a pipeline integrity manager creating alignment sheets or a transportation engineer creating regulated straight-line diagrams, Geocortex Inline has the tools you need.
One of the areas where Geocortex Inline really shines is its ability to easily integrate with Geocortex Workflow and Geocortex Reporting.
In this week’s Tech Tip, watch Colin show you how to launch a report from Geocortex Inline, which draws upon capabilities in both Geocortex Workflow and Geocortex Reporting technologies.
Video Transcript
“Hello. My name is Colin Doak, I am a Technical Advisor with the partners team here at VertiGIS and I am going to show you how to launch a report from Geocortex Inline. Let’s get started!
In order to run a report from Geocortex Inline, you first need to author Geocortex Workflow, which is responsible for running the ‘Run Workflow’ activity.
Workflows are invoked from Inline from actions. The ‘Actions’ menu is on the left over here. You can see that I’ve configured a few.
We are going to be walking through ‘Create Anomaly Report’ action in more detail, but there is another one that I’ve created called ‘Sample Action’, which illustrates the parameters that past from Geocortex Inline to Geocortex Workflow and it’s useful for being able to show you just all the information that has passed, and what information we are going to use to actually report.
Let’s have a look at this in Geocortex Web. Let’s fire up Inline, capture a start and end measure and in this particular view – this is an integrity view for pipeline – what I’ve done is I’ve configured the sample action report to be run off a feature within the integrity band here. If I right-click on the band, and select a feature, you can see that I have the sample action.
If I run this, you can see that this is going to run a workflow, it presents a form, which illustrates all the parameters that are passed to the workflow from the Inline. You can see that there is a whole bunch of information. I’ve organized them with the parameters that are associated with the band. So, we’ve got the ‘measure’, that is the location along the pipeline. Where I click, this is all the band information and details with the band itself and its configuration and the range information; we have the ‘beginStation’ and ‘endStation’. We also have ‘Chart Parameters’, this is the configuration of the chart and at the very bottom here we have the ‘Feature Data’.
So, because I’ve selected a particular anomaly in that chart, that anomaly’s feature data is passed to workflow as well.
So, you can see that there are all sorts of information that are passed based to Workflow from Inline. These are all default parameters, there is no need to configure any of them, they are passed anytime you invoke a workflow from an action.
Let’s have a look at our ‘Create Anomaly Report’. Again, we are pointing to a workflow, and let’s have a look at that workflow. So, we are doing a whole bunch of different things in this report.
We are actually creating an image. We’re not going to go into that in this particular demonstration. The most important thing to look at is that we are using the ‘Get Workflow Inputs’ activity which captures all the inputs that are passed into the workflow.
So, that’s all those parameters that I just showed you in the sample action, and then what we want to do is create a parameter’s object and we have a branch here. Because this is a demonstration workflow, we need to be able to identify which viewer we are in. We want to be able to identify that we are in a Geocortex Web Viewer. If you are just building a workflow that is specific to – for example – our viewer for HTML5, or Geocortex Web, or Web AppBuilder, this step isn’t necessary because you are probably using one viewer, but because we are doing a demonstration, we need to be able to identify the viewer.
All that’s doing is that it’s making sure that we are getting the workflow input parameters correctly and what we want to do is, you can see it here when we are setting the parameter’s properties, is that we are trying to create an object which captures all the parameters that we want to pass on to our report.
We’ve hard-coded the year parameter, but you can see for the routeID, we are getting the range information, beginStation, routeID. Of course, for the start measure and the end measure, were able to get that range information, we can get that beginStation measure and we can get the endStation measure.
So, we create those parameters and then we simply pass it to the ‘Run Report’ activity.
Here we have the report, and of course the parameters are that parameters object. We are able to run the report and generate it using those parameters. And the final piece of course is to show a link for the download. That’s a pretty simple form, what we are doing is we are actually just getting the run report href, and we are able to show that as a link and the user can download the report.
Let’s have a look at that in action.
Here again, we are on the integrity anomalies band. What I’ve done is I’ve configured this particular report to be run from the chart, so it’s not specific to a particular anomaly within this chart. We are really interested in the whole range of information presented in the chart.
So, if I right click, you can see that we have the ‘Create Anomaly Report’ here, when I click that, it’s going to run workflow, it’s passing those parameters and when it’s completed, what it’ll do is that it’ll present the hyperlink for downloading.
Now the important thing around that, is that we are able to focus the report on either the band action, chart action, or a feature action.
We can see that we are done here, click the report, and again I have an image that I’m adding to this, but this is a little bit of an extra, it isn’t that pertinent for this particular example. But you can see that we are getting the year, we are also getting the stationing, beginning and end measure and we are getting all the details.
Let’s have a look at the report configuration. Again, nothing too crazy here. If you are familiar with Geocortex Reporting, what we’ve done is that we’ve created a detail area, which is calling it data source and that data source is our feature server for that particular Inline data set. So, that is that integrity data feature server, and we are capturing the parameters right here. We have a sheetURL, start, end, bandURL and the xScaleURL. Using those, we are able to generate the report.
So that’s how we invoke reports. The big takeaway is that a report must be run from a workflow, there is a preset parameters that are passed to a report from Inline, those are also documented in Inline documentation in detail and the report itself must be able to take those and generate a report using the typical report data source and parametrization methods which are also in document.”
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