Geocortex Workflow 5 offers such a wide variety of activities, tools, and functionality that it can be a little confusing to understand exactly what everything does. To help you out, we’ve added several in-app features that provide context and help you better understand the tools and activities you’re using.
In this week’s Geocortex Tech Tip, Ryan Cooney (Geocortex Workflow 5 Product Manager) provides a detailed look at how to use the in-app help system to build the best workflows possible.
Video Transcription
“Hi, I’m Ryan, and I’m a Product Manager at Latitude. Today we’re going to look at the in-app help system in Geocortex Workflow 5… lets do it!
When you’re authoring a workflow, there’s a number of ways to get help. The first is going to be through this help menu. If I click on the help button, it’s going to open this help tab. It’s got a few standard links to useful parts of our documentation:
- “What’s New” is basically our release notes. Every time we update [Geocortex] Workflow, we’re going publish to this page.
- And this is on a public Documentation Center, where all of our Geocortex [product documentation is available]. Geocortex Workflow is in here, and we’re describing any new features that have been added, as well as any issues that were fixed. [You can access] the full details down here.
- Also, we’ve got a couple sections here on key concepts and getting started. This is a great place to start for anyone new [to Geocortex Workflow]. It will take you through basically an end-to-end process that will help you get up and running with [Geocortex] Workflow. You can use this to [help you] build your first workflow.
- We also have complete documentation of all the activities and form elements that are supported in [Geocortex] Workflow. And this is going to describe everything about the activity or form element; what its inputs are, what it’s actually doing. [You’ll also find] keyboard shortcuts, so things like “Ctrl+S” to save, and some more advanced topics are in here. [There’s] a full list of all the keyboard shortcuts we support.
- The last link in here is a link to the Community. Geocortex Workflow has an [online] community where users can post questions to forums – we have product announcements in here, and there’s lots of good stuff in the forums, and there’s tons of traffic. So, if you have a question, do post it on the [Geocortex Workflow] Community and you’ll get feedback right away.
That’s it for the help panel itself, but there’s a few other places help shows up. Anywhere you see a question mark in the application, you can mouse over it and get some information about it: in this case, in the tool box, there’s information about these activities. I can see the “container” activity, and it’s got this information about it. And if I click the “more” link, it will take me to the [Geocortex] Documentation Center where it’s describing the activity and all of its inputs and outputs, as well as any info about whether this activity has any requirements for working offline. In this case, this “container” activity has no special requirements for offline. It will work offline.
We have this info available for every activity. If we look at an example from this workflow I’m designing right now, I can get the same information in the right-hand properties panel. So, if I just click on an activity, I get the same sort of information in this panel. And also, for any inputs, outputs or properties, I can get information about the specific ones. So, the “if” activity has a condition input that’s of type “Boolean”. In this case it’s taking me to the Mozilla development network, describing what a Boolean is.
But if we were to work within an Esri-specific activity that’s going to take something a little more complicated, like in this case a geometry. I can see that I’ve got a “set scene viewpoint” activity that takes a geometry, and that geometry can either be a 3.x or 4.x Esri Javascript API object. And if we click either of these links it will take us to the Esri documentation, so we can see how to go about creating one of these, or see what properties are available on a geometry.
The same applies to forms. If I open up this form and select “form element”, the properties panel is going to provide me information about — in this case the “text box” input — and if I click on “more info” I’m taken to a page describing this “text box” input, [including] all of the properties that it has available for configuration, and their type information.
So, there is help everywhere in [Geocortex] Workflow Designer, so take advantage of that help system. And all that documentation is in our public [Geocortex] Documentation Center that you can browse at your leisure, even outside of just Geocortex Workflow Designer, so take advantage of that.”
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