Geocortex Mobile is the world’s most capable framework for configuring and building mobile offline-capable apps on Esri’s ArcGIS platform.
By configuring your data in your ArcGIS Online or Portal Enterprise environment as well as the Geocortex Mobile App Designer, your GIS administrators can provide a streamlined editing experience for your field workers. Simply give them the data they need without any unnecessary clutter to help maximize their field data collection efficiency.
With that in mind, today’s Geocortex Tech Tip is dedicated to showing you how Geocortex Mobile’s feature editing capabilities are designed to integrate and enhance your existing Esri solutions.
Video Transcript
“Hi, I’m Phil. I’m a Software QA Analyst with the Geocortex Mobile team, and today we are going to look at some of our out-of-the box feature editing capabilities.
Gecortex Mobile’s feature editing capabilities are designed to integrate with and enhance the ArcGIS or Portal Enterprise editing experience.
We begin our journey as we usually do, here in my ArcGIS Online or Portal Enterprise environment. I’m going to navigate over to my content section to select the web map that I would like to use to start this with. There are several different places throughout this process where a GIS administrator can configure the editing experience for your field users.
If I would like to control the editing for a single layer, such as this one here, I can navigate to its entry within my environment, navigate to the ‘Settings’ tab, and when I scroll down to see the configurations, I see that I can turn editing on or off completely, and if it’s enabled, I have the option to set fine-grained editing controls.
You can also configure what features will appear for your users by going into the ArcGIS Online Map Viewer and configuring the pop-up. This pop-up will control what attributes are displayed or editable. This is great if they are fields that are valuable to a GIS administrator, but not so useful to your field users. For example, an object ID might be very valuable for an administrator, but to a field user, it might not be terribly useful. So, once I’ve configured all my settings for my attribute fields and editing permissions, it’s time to take the web map over into our Mobile App Designer.
From here, I can simply go and create a new app, via our mobile default template. Once this loads, it’s going to integrate with my ArcGIS Online account. So, I’m going to navigate over to the ‘Map’ panel here on the side. We have a default web map configured, but I’m going to select the one that we were just working on right here.
So, once this loads it then reaches into your account and goes and pulls out those same layers that we were looking at and here we have yet another way of controlling what sort of editing experience your users are going to have. For an individual layer, I can use these four toggles here to decide whether or not that feature can be identified, whether it can be searched for, whether it can be edited, or whether it can be deleted and all of these permissions are respected from the ArcGIS Online settings and cascade on down.
I can get a little bit more fine-grained as well, if for a specific attribute field. If I’d like it to be searchable or not, I can also toggle that there. Once I am satisfied with all of my settings, I can simply save my app, and give it an appropriate title, save and I’m ready to hand my app off my field users.
When I’m ready to head out to the field, I’m going to fire up my preferred mobile device and I’m going to launch the Geocortex Go app. Because I was already signed in, it’s going to take me to our app selector screen, which contains a list of all the apps that I have available to me, including the one we just created in the Mobile App Designer here at the top left.
So, I’m going to click into that and this is going to take to a view of that same web map we configured before, containing a bunch of points, polylines, and polygons with different styles and symbology.
The first step to editing a feature is to identify it. You can do it in a few ways such as our Search tool here. So, I can enter in a term that I know corresponds to a feature, which applies a highlight there. I can use the ‘Zoom to Feature’ button there, which will zoom me into it and pulse the map, and I can see the information. When I click ‘Edit’, it’s going to change my view, which allows me to modify the geometry just by tapping around in the map wherever I’d like it to go, and then I can go and make the adjustments to the appropriate fields, entering in some numbers, using some dropdowns, some text fields to indicate that my report has been completed, there we go, and then I’m going to stamp it with today’s date, and click ‘Save,’ and we will see the geometry has moved and the feature attributes have been updated.
Now, in addition to doing the search, I can also just simply tap on a feature, which again applies that highlight there, and so when I go and click ‘Edit’ because this is a polyline, it’s going to change the experience, which indicates that I can just grab onto those nodes and drag and drop them to wherever I would like to update the geometry for, and I can go and replace them that placeholder name with the real one because I know this is West 4th Street. I’m going to click ‘Save’ and we’ll see the geometry and the feature attribute has been updated.
In addition to working with points, polylines and polygons, we can also work with related records. So, I’m going to zoom in and pick this feature here that has a Backflow Inspection related record that has already been completed, but I want to adjust it. So, I’m going to go in, again I can see all the appropriate fields, I’m going to click on ‘edit’ and it’s going to take me to this same type of experience, where I can go adjust the fields as appropriate, we’ll just update the date for now and click ‘Save’. There we go.
In addition to the identify and search, you can also configure a workflow to specifically identify a feature if you would like. This is for the online experience, but Geocortex Mobile also allows you to go offline by activating a map area. This gives me that same sort of feature experience, but within a specific area set for offline. So, I can tap around and identify a couple of different features, but this time let’s take a look at a polygon.
So, we are going to zoom in, we’re going to hit ‘Edit’ and again those nodes appear, which indicates that I can then drag them out and redefine my geometry like so (not the prettiest work I’ve ever done, but you get the idea). I can go and modify that field, and click ‘Save’, and there we go!
I now have the geometry and the features updated and stored it in that map area. So, you’ll see that ‘Send Changes’ badge is ready, which indicates that the data is in an offline state, so when I go back online, I can simply click on the ‘Send Changes’ button, and those changes will be pushed up to the cloud.
This concludes our demonstration for out-of-the-box feature editing capabilities. I hope you found it useful and don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel as we are putting out great new content all the time. Thank you very much and have a great day!”
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