Application management can be a headache for GIS managers, but with the Geocortex Web and Geocortex Mobile, you now have a streamlined mechanism for creating and managing deployment methods by using the Geocortex Designer. This means that you to make changes to your app without affecting end users. Whether you’re looking for a simple development – production option, or something with a few more steps, enjoy the flexibility to utilize different types of deployment strategies that best fit your needs.
In today’s tech tip video, we’ll show you how to better understand these deployment strategies in the Geocortex Web and Geocortex Mobile Designers.
Video Transcript
“Hi there, I’m Conner. I’m a software developer on the Geocortex app designer team. Today we’ll be talking about understanding application management in Designer. Let’s get started!
The goal we are trying to accomplish today is making changes to our app without affecting our end users.
Previously to solve this problem, the GIS Manager was responsible for making copies of the app, making changes and then replacing the production app with a new updated version. Now, we can do all this to the designer interface.
I’ll be showing this through Web designer, but the steps are the exact same for Mobile Designer. Here, I have our default template and we can see our deployment configuration in the sidebar. There’s a lot going on here, but we will be going through everything today in this Tech Tip.
We need to save the app before we do anything, so let’s do that. Let’s also make some changes to our ‘I want to menu’. I’m going to use the selection tool here, go to the ‘I want to menu’ and change the title to ‘I would like to’. We will save our app to ‘Deployment Tech Tip,’ and now we can see everything is being activated in our deployment configuration.
First, let’s pick our deployment strategy. By default, you’re given the ‘Dev – Prod’ strategy, but we also give you the flexibility for ‘Dev – Test – Prod’ and ‘Dev – Test – Staging – Prod.’ The ‘Dev – Test – Prod’ strategy is quite powerful, as I can push my app to testing and continue working on it without changing the app on the quality assurance team. Once approved, we’d push the app from the testing environment to the production environment for end-users to see.
For simplicity today, we’ll just use our ‘Dev – Prod’ strategy. Let’s push our app to production and let’s launch our production app.
There you have it! You have a production app.
So, let’s pretend that I made a mistake and I actually want this to be titled ‘I really want to.’
We can see that our production app hasn’t changed, so our end users haven’t been affected by this change in development. Now, we want our end-users to see this new title, so let’s push to production.
We’re shown a deployment summary. This shows everything in the configuration of our app that has changed. Our ‘I want to’ menu title changed which we see here, which is expected. Now, if I refresh our app; we can see our new title.
You may want different services for your production app then your dev or test environments. Instead of constantly having to make these changes, we push from dev to test to staging to prod, we can accomplish this through the environment value.
Let’s open this up and we’ll add a row. What this will do is look for the configuration of our app and replace text with different text. I’m going to look for a certain layer and I’m going to replace it with a different layer. Let’s save and push production.
Again, we’re showing this deployment summary, and we can see that our web map has found this layer and it’s going to replace it with this layer. Hit ‘Ok’ to push the production and now refresh our production app. We can see our buildings layer is now blue!
Behind the scenes, were also helping you manage your web maps and web scenes. Let’s open up ArcGIS Online and sign in. Under ‘My Content’, and then ‘Geocortex Viewer Files (don’t delete)’ folder, we can see our development app, our production app, and copies of our web map. This is so that if the original web map or web scene was deleted, your end users won’t be affected because we’ve had these copies.
Let’s say we’re all done with our app and we actually want to delete it now. It’s not being used. We would go to ‘My Apps,’ find our app, delete and were also help cleaning up all the reference items through your app. So, the dev app, the production app, and the copies of the web map and web scene.
Thanks for listening, and I hope this video helped you better understand deployment strategies in Geocortex Designer.”
Interested in learning more about Geocortex Web or Geocortex Mobile? Click the respective buttons below for more information, or to schedule a personal demonstration.
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