With Geocortex Workflow 5, authoring workflows has never been easier. With a library of 170 pre-built activities that chain together seamlessly, you can covert even the most sophisticated business processes into a simple, guided end-user experience.
One of the things that we’re really proud of when it comes to Workflow 5 is its ability to automate virtually any task, so we thought it would be fitting to show you in this week’s Geocortex Tech Tip how to use our Workflow technology to automatically display a form for editing layer attributes.
Video Transcript
“Hi, my name’s Jeff. I’m a software developer on Geocortex Workflow 5, and today I’m going to show you how to display a form using Workflow so that you can edit features in your layer.
Let’s get started!
So, I’m going to demo this for you today in the new Geocortex Mobile Viewer which means the Esri objects that we’re interacting with in this workflow are going to be from the ArcGIS .NET Runtime, so you might notice a few slight differences form the JavaScript API. So, to show our form we are going to use a display form activity, and I’ve gone ahead and preconfigured some activities for this workflow just to save time.
On our display form activity, we’re not going to configure any form elements and that is because we want to dynamically display the form depending on the layer that we have. To set the dynamic form elements we’re going to use the ‘load’ event handler in the forms header. If we look in here the first thing, we need to do is get the layer using the ‘Get Layer’ activity and I’m going to be using a web map that has a layer with the ID ‘Service_Request_8759’. That’s going to get our layer and the next thing we’re going to want to do is add a form element for each field in the layer. So, we’re going to iterate over the fields in the layer. You can see we’re going layer.featureTable.fields and this feature table is a .NETism.
The first thing we’re going to do on our ‘For Each’ loop is just assign the field to a variable, so that we don’t have to access each For Each loop current item every time so this is a Create Value activity. Then the next thing we want to do is check if the field is editable, so we’re going to check the ‘isEditable’ property. If it’s not editable then we’re not going do anything because we don’t want to display anything.
So, then we’re going to create an object for our form element and we’re going to assign a few properties we’re going to set the description to the field alias and I’m going to set the items to an empty object, which I’ll come back to in a few minutes. Next, we want to decide which kind of view UI control to create for each field.
The first case we’re going to handle is fields that have coded value domains so in this if activity we’re checking if the field has a domain object and if that domain object has coded values. If it does then we’re going to want to show a dropdown box with the coded value domains in it. So were going to iterate over the coded value domains so you can see ‘domain.codedValues’ in our For Each loop here. And the first thing we’re going to do in here is just assign the coded value to the variable, so we don’t have to access the For Each loop every time and we’re going to create an object for the form item.
The ‘label’ is going to be the name of the coded value and the ‘value’ is going to be the value of the coded value. And then we’re going to set this item on our form element object. As you can see, I’m targeting the items property of the form element object. And we have to assign it a unique ID so we’re just going to use the pass of the For Each activity and we’re going to call toString on it because it has to be a string ID, and we’re going to pass in the object we just created. Next, we’re going to add the dropdown list form item to our form and we’re going to do this using the ‘Add Form Element’ activity. We have to provide a unique ID, so we’re going to use the name of the field and we have to specify the type of form element that we want to use (you should get some intellisense in here), we want to use a dropdown list and we’re going to put in our form element object that we just created.
Next, I’m going to show you how to do a number field. So, for this we have to look at the fieldType property of the field and in .NET, this is a numeration that is backed by integers, so we just have to compare it to its integer value, so the value for an integer is one. So, we want to create a format object for our number to ensure it appears as an integer – so to do this we set the precision to ‘0’, meaning no decimal places are shown and we want to set the step to ‘1’.
Next, we want to set our format object that we just created on the form element object, so we’re setting the format property on our form element object to the format object that we just created. Once again, we’re going to use the Add Form Element activity to add this to our form. This time we’re going to chose number and we’re going to use the field name as the ID. So next I’m going to show you a string field. So, the integer value of field type for a string is ‘7’, so we’re just checking for a ‘7’ so in that case we want to add a TextArea form element to our form. So, it’s the simplest case using the field name again.
Alright, I’m going to demo this for you in the Geocortex Mobile Viewer now.
Let’s quickly take a look at the Json in the feature layer that I’m using here. These are the fields in the feature layer, and you can see I have a string field called ‘REQUESTSTATUS’ that uses some coded value domains; there’s three domains in there. I’ve got a regular string field called ‘DESCRIPTION’ and an integer field named ‘SEVERITY’. So, this the workflow that we made to show the form elements will cover all three of these fields.
Let’s pop open Geocortex Mobile Viewer and I’ll show you the workflow. So, this is just an extremely bare bones version of the mobile viewer that I’ve configured solely for the purpose of showing you this workflow. So, I have the workflow on the task bar and if I click on it, you’ll see that I’ll get one form element for each of the fields that are editable. So, I’ve got my ‘Status’ element which is a dropdown box. I can choose the value, the ‘Description’ field is just a string field, and the ‘Severity’ field is just an integer. So, if I type in that I can see that it is an integer and I can step up my integer values.
And that’s how we create a dynamic form for a given layer. Thanks for watching!”
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