Geocortex Inline allows users to easily create applications that launch with startup parameters. By adding startup parameters to Inline URLs, you can ensure that end-users are being taken to the correct location upon application startup. This can help to enhance end-user efficiency and simplify the process of sharing apps with co-workers or other users!
This Geocortex Tech Tip demonstrates how to use workflows to create Inline applications that launch with startup parameters. Further, it explains how to add startup parameters to Inline URLs and describes why this process for adding startup parameters is more efficient and effective than alternative methods.
Video Transcription:
What’s up, everybody? My name is Aaron Oxley and I’m a Technical Sales Specialist. In this Tech Tip we’ll be looking at launching Geocortex Inline with startup parameters. Let’s check it out!
Here we are in a Geocortex app. It’s a pretty simple one. I’ve got an “I want to…” menu and a few tools.
As you can probably tell from the banner, this is all about Geocortex Inline. In most cases this is what an instance of Geocortex Inline looks like when we first open it. There’s no data available because we haven’t selected anything.
The first step is to select a “Route”. I can use this route selector tool. Once I click that, the tool is active. As I hover my mouse on the map it will highlight the nearest center line. When I click to select that center line it automatically activates the range selector tool to pick my start and end points. Alternatively, I could add values into the “Start” and “End” boxes. But either way we’ve got the range that we were looking for.
We’re here to talk about startup parameters though, so you might be wondering why I’m talking about selecting routes and ranges. Let me explain. This is typical. So, in most cases selecting a route and a range are the first steps after opening a Geocortex Inline view, but it’s not necessary.
Let’s say I’ve got a project like this one right here that I want to come to every day. Or maybe I need to show it to a coworker. I could send them a link to this app and tell them to open Geocortex Inline and select Interstate 20 and set the “Start” to 53.24 and the “End” to 54.23. That works, but there’s an easier way.
Let’s say I want to have a link to open Inline and have it automatically zoom to this project that we are working on. Let’s do that.
First though let’s take a look at the simple examples that I mentioned before – coming back to this range everyday or sharing the app with a coworker. It’s really simple. If I click “Tools” then “Share”, I get a URL. This URL will take me to this exact route and range on startup.
I’m going to copy this URL so we can take a closer look at it. Here is our “Base URL” for the application. The only startup parameter in the base URL is to tell it which application to open.
I’m going to paste in the “URL with startup parameters” below. Right now, it looks long and complicated. You can probably see though, that the top line, the first part, is identical. It’s just these parameters below that are different. We’ll break the parameters onto separate lines to make it easier to read. These ampersands are what separate the parameters.
We can see now that it’s just passing in a “viewID”, a “routeID”, a “startMeasure” and an “endMeasure”.
So that’s a nice, easy way to get a URL that will load to a route and range that we’ve already been to. But this method requires me to manually select this route and range at least once. Where it gets more powerful is the ability to automatically generate some URLs with parameters. Let’s take a look at that.
In this dataset, let’s talk about these projects. I want to generate a list of links that will load the exact route and range for each of these projects. And I want to refresh that list daily – or maybe let my users get the list in real time whenever they like.
So, I’ve built a workflow. It’s pretty simple. There’s a “Display Form” and this display form has a button to “Generate URLs with parameters”. When this button gets clicked, a sub-workflow runs and this workflow “Creates URLs Value” that holds the text string of all the URLs combined together. Then it goes out and “Queries Projects Layer” and returns all the projects with the route and range information. Then we loop through all the projects and generate a URL for each with startup parameters and add it to the value that was created here in the “Create URLs Value” step. And finally, we “Display URLs” in this text component of the “Display Form”.
Let’s come back to our app. I’ve added our workflow to the “I want to…” menu. If I click the menu and select our workflow, I can click this “Generate URLs with parameters” button to generate URLs with startup parameters. Now we should see a URL for each of the projects that exists in the projects layer. If I click one of these it loads up the same application along with Inline and the startup parameters to take us to the route and range for the project in question.
So that’s a really nice way to do it with a workflow. You might want to extend that to incorporate some logic so that you’re only selecting certain features based on criteria or looking for higher concentrations of events along a center line. There’s a lot of different ways to extend this functionality and really make it match your use case.
I hope this video gave you a feel for how URLs with startup parameters can help your users launch Geocortex Inline a little more efficiently and be sure that they’re going to exactly where you want them to go.
So that’s launching Geocortex Inline with startup parameters. If you want to know more, just let us know, email info@geocortex.com. If this video is helpful for you, please like, share, subscribe and check out our other videos. Thanks for watching!
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