The Geocortex Web and Geocortex Mobile Designer interface allows developers to build visually stunning applications with a flexible viewer framework. It provides unparalleled versatility, giving you full control over the look and feel of your applications.
One of the many exciting features is the ability to add and configure feature actions in Geocortex Designer to the results on your map, allowing users to quickly perform a variety of actions when they click on a point of interest.
Watch us demonstrate what this looks like and some use cases on the benefits in today’s Geocortex Tech Tip.
Video Transcript
“Hi, my name is Cam Barnard, I am a Product Manager here with Geocortex software.
Today, we are going to be talking about feature actions within Geocortex Web and Geocortex Mobile. Feature actions are the results that occur when you do an identify or search, and within the software, there is the ability to configure what shows up for your end-users when that happens. We are going to talk about generic feature actions, layer specific feature actions, and why you might use them.
Let’s get to it!
When we speak of feature actions, we’re referring to results on your map. When you have results on your map, each of those results has a set of actions associated with it. These actions, we call them feature actions, you can think of a feature and a result of the same thing.
To kick things off, we’re going to be here in Web with our live preview, and you can see I actually have three standard actions. ‘Zoom to Results’, ‘Export to CSV’, and ‘Export to XLSX’.
Now, if I use Pinpoint Search and I pull up the results list, for example, you’ll see those same three options. Zoom to Results, Export to CSV, and Export to XLSX.
First thing you need to understand about feature actions is that there is two different places to configure them. First, you can configure them to the results themselves, this then applies to all map results features of any type. If I add something here, let’s go ahead and do that. Let’s say we want to add a pulse highlight option, and then I go back and click on this building. You can see that I have pulse highlight action. If I was to click on a fire hydrant, there’s my fire hydrant, it also has that pulse highlight option.
When you configure things on the Results List, or on the results in general, you are actually configuring it for all layer types.
Now, in Web specifically, you can see here that my Results List and my Results Table are sharing the same underlying configuration. It doesn’t matter whether I go to my Results List or my Results Table, I will see these same actions. That’s the default behavior that we put together in the template for you, but it is not actually the only behavior. So, what that means is that you go here, I can see a set of results here, I can see a set of results and they are all the same.
Let’s do another identify to highlight that better. There you go and there are your results. But it is not necessary to configure it that way. If you happen to have a use case, where you want your Results List to have a different set of actions for instance than your Results Table, that is also a possible configuration.
I’m going to go ahead and remove this pulse highlight, now I want to show you a second aspect of configuring things. So, today, when we click on a building, we have these three options. The other thing you can do for feature actions is drill directly into the map itself.
If I come down to my Buildings layer, you can also see that you have feature actions configuration at the top of each layer. This is now unique to that specific layer type, and if we add something here, I’m going to get a little bit creative and do this. ‘Building Info’, create a new action associated with that, and just for fun let’s change this icon to something a little more interesting.
Now, when I click on a building, you can see that I have a Building Info feature action and if I invoke that, it’s going to pull up a bunch of additional information for that building. You’ll also possibly note that Building Info shows up first. So, feature actions that are configured on the layer level, always show up first, and then are followed by the generic ones. This way you can create things that are specific to a feature type as well as general. So, in default for example, I have water pipes, and I can click ‘Measure Pipe’, which puts a bit of that pipe on the map. It is quite possible to have different actions on different layer types, and then you have a common set that is shared across all of them. That’s the most important fundamentals to understand about feature actions.
Just to show this to you in the context of Mobile. I’ve gone ahead and created a mobile app, a I have it running here in Geocortex Go. So, if click on ‘Buildings’ you can see that I have one item, which is ‘Zoom to Feature’.
If I want to, for example, add a new feature action onto my buildings, it works exactly the same way. In this case, let’s go ahead and open a URL. Alright, so I’ll save this, go into Go, and we’ll refresh our app.
Now when we click on a building, we’ll have a second option here that’ll show us buildings, just as an example. So, you can do this type of behavior both in Geocortex Web and in Geocortex Go and it pretty much works the same way where you’re doing one set of generic and then a layer specific one on specific layers.
I hope that gives you some more insight on how to use feature actions in Geocortex Designer within your applications. The combination of general feature actions that apply to all features and layer specific feature actions is quite a powerful way to do your configurations.”
Have any more questions about feature actions in Geocortex Designer, or about Geocortex Web and Geocortex Mobile? Click the buttons below to learn more about each product, or to schedule a personal demonstration.
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