Geocortex Web has the capability to save the state of an application when you save and load projects. This can allow end users to improve workflows, create project backups and more easily share their results!
In this Geocortex Tech Tip, we provide an overview of the project elements that get saved when you save and load projects inside of Geocortex Web and demonstrate how this feature can improve both your GIS applications and your user experience.
Video Transcription:
“Hey everyone, my name’s Patrick Fingler and in this Tech Tip video I’m going to be highlighting how to save and load projects inside of Geocortex Web. Let’s get started!
In this Tech Tip video, I’m going to provide you with an overview of all the different elements that get saved when you save a project in Geocortex Web. Geocortex Web has this capability to save and load projects and this allows an end user to essentially save the state of the application that they are working with, which can be really nice for improving their user workflows that they might be running on a day to basis, or creating backups or just sharing some analysis with different users as well.
So, to get started I’ll first provide you just an overview of all of the different elements. Some of the things that get saved when you save a project include the map location, this includes the extent of the map, the scale, the rotation, the underlying map layers that you have toggled on and off, any layers that you have added at run-time, so if you’ve uploaded a layer via a shapefile or added it using our layer catalogue tool, those will get included in the saved project. If you’ve adjusted the base map that will be included as well. Any mark-up or measurements that you add as well as the underlying results. If you’ve identified some features and those results have been included that will also get included within your saved project.
Let’s confirm this so that you can see how you can leverage saved projects and just get an understanding of what types of information get stored.
First let’s turn off and on some layers. So, maybe you want to turn off the “Buildings” layer and maybe turn on this “Neighborhoods” layer which I think we have to zoom out to view. So, there’s some different neighborhoods available. Additionally, let’s maybe change our base map as well. So, let’s turn it into “World Navigation Map” which is one of my favorite base maps provided by Esri.
Let’s also add some user-added layers as well. Let’s click “Add Layer” and search for Victoria BC. Maybe we’re interested in “Abundance of Grocery Stores In Victoria BC”. You can see I have now added that as a layer. If I zoom out, we should see a couple of them. So, we can see there’s one or two in this particular neighborhood. We’ve got two down here.
Let’s also change our extent. So, let’s maybe zoom to this particular location, maybe rotate the map a little bit. You can see our scale has now changed.
Let’s identify a couple of features as well. Let’s select a number of features here. We can see we’ve got 5 water lines, one of those features selected to fire hydrants.
If I wanted to, I could even export some of this data to a shapefile just to also show that we can also upload shapefiles as well. Let’s go back and “Add Layer from File” and “Add Shapefile”. Let’s just “Browse” to that location. You can see this is the name of the shapefile that I just exported and here we can see we’ve got some water lines that have been added. You can see that these ones are a little bit lighter blue, it’s a bit hard to see, but these are a little bit lighter compared to the original ones. So, we uploaded a shapefile and we’ve also added a user-added layer for those grocery stores.
Additionally, we might want to add some markup onto the maps. Maybe I want to draw a polygon to highlight this particular playground that’s listed there.
Maybe we want to add some measurements as well. Let’s select this water line over here and “Measure Pipe”. We can see that it’s 160 meters. Or maybe we want to just add some arbitrary measurements or area as well. Let’s get an approximate measurement of the area of this particular building. Then let’s finally select some results as well. So, let’s select a couple of these results here.
You know at this point I’m pretty happy with the current state of my project. We’ve adjusted the extent, the rotation of the map, the scale, we’ve turned on and off certain layers, we’ve added user layers, we’ve added some markup and measurements. Maybe I want to share these results with another user. To do so I can go to “I want to…” and click on “Save Project”. I’m just using the default template that is provided with our default WebGIS template. But if you wanted to, maybe you’re not too sure where this “Save Project” command lives, you can also add a saved project option to the toolbar.
Here I’ve navigated to our toolbar component. Let’s just “Add Menu Item”. You can see here that this is a list of commands. If we scroll down, we can see there’s a “Load Project” command and there’s also a “Save Project” command. I’ll click “Select” and I’ll save that project. Then here if we click on “Save Project” this is going to open up the prompt. It asks for a title. I’ll say this is my custom project and click “OK”. This is going to export that to a json file. Then here if I want to refresh my app, this is the same app but just the default state, I’m going to go ahead and load that project.
So, let’s go “I want to…” then “Load Project”. You can see here that we’ve got the buildings layer turned on, we’ve got a different base map here. I’ll just upload that project that we just exported, select my custom project, and click “OK”.
Here you can see that the project has been successfully loaded. We can see we’ve got some measurements being listed on the map, we’ve got some markup, our results lists and features got successfully added, we’ve successfully navigated to the current extent and the rotation has been applied. If we go back and go to our layers list, you can see here that the grocery stores feature and these two points that we added got uploaded, as well as the shapefile that we uploaded.
Hopefully that gives you an overview of all of the different things that you can store when you save a project inside of Geocortex Web. If you are happy with this video please like, share and subscribe. Bye for now!”
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