Using the Inline Designer to build linear referencing views [Geocortex Tech Tip]

Geocortex Inline is the industry-leading tool for managing linear referenced assets, and we wanted to take the next few weeks to really show off how powerful this new technology is!

In the first of our Geocortex Inline-themed tech tip videos, we’ll show you how to use the Geocortex Inline Designer to build linear referencing views, and how to deploy them in your Geocortex Essentials, Web AppBuilder, and Geocortex Web applications.

Watch on Youtube.

Video Transcript

“Hi everyone! My name is Patrick Fingler and in this Tech Tip video, I’m going to show you how to create linear referencing views in the Geocortex Inline Designer. Let’s take a look!

Alright, so in this Tech Tip video, we’re going to show you how you can configure these linear referencing views, using the Geocortex Inline Designer. So, what we’re currently viewing right now is Geocortex Inline running in our Geocortex Essentials application, but it can also run in Web AppBuilder for ArcGIS as well as Geocortex Web.

The idea behind Geocortex Inline is it’s a tool that allows your end-users to visualize their assets along a linear asset network.

In this example, I’ve got a pipeline and I’ve selected a segment. Within that pipeline, I’m doing some underlying assets along that and we’ve got some bi-directional communication between the map in our alignment sheet here. This could be any type of linear referenced network. Like a highway or a utility line, and you could again use Inline to visualize those underlying assets.

Now, within Inline, you can have multiple views. So, you can have as many different views as you want, and you can categorize your events based on a view. And then, a single view can have many bands.

So, here I’ve got a Point of Interest band, an Elevation Profile band, this is I think Pipe Properties, and inside of these bands, you can have a single chart or multiple charts.

Here, we’ve got some valves, we’ve got some linear segments as well showing, I guess the coding and pipe segments. We’ve got another information here, such as the depth of cover, etc.

So, there is a variety of different types of charts that you can add to these bands inside of a single view, and again you can have multiple different views, showing different linear event data.

So, how does all of this get configured? Well, you use the Geocortex Inline Designer, to configure those, kinds of views, and it’s a web-based designer, like all of our web-based products. You’re logging in with your ArcGIS Online or ArcGIS Enterprise identity as the underlining administrator who’s building these views.

Let’s just get started by selecting a new view here. By default, we add the Point of Interest view here, but we are going to want to first, define the underlying linear network that we want to connect this to.

In order to do that, we’re going to navigate to the ‘Info’ tab, and then there is this ‘Map Options’. Here, you need to specify the Centerline Layer, that you ultimately want to use as your linear reference network.

Here, I’m just going to import some of this information that I’ve already done. Here, you can see that this is my Geometry Service, my Centerline Layer, which here we can see that this is the underlying layer rest endpoint, we can navigate to the layer.

What’s really important for the Centerline Layer is that it needs to have end values enabled. So here, if you’ve published your data and ensured that it’s linear referenceable. Here you can see it’s got ‘HasM: true’. And there’s a variety of different data models that you can use to accomplish this: Pods, UPDM, roads, and highways, and other methods. As long as your data has N values and some stationing measure values, we should be able to use it for Geocortex Inline.

Then, we’ll have to specify the ‘Route ID’ attribute and then the ‘Route Name’, you can select the units of measurement, you can determine the decimal or Station Notation Decimals if you want to. I’m pretty happy with that.

So, let’s save that and we can immediately test this out by running in the Sandbox. So, what I’ve done is that I’ve gone to the setting and I’ve added a web map that has this layer within that web map. So now, when I go into my Sandbox environment, we can launch up Inline, I can select my stationing tool, and here you can see we’ve kind of snapped to it, we’re seeing that station notation showing up and we can confirm that we are actually retrieving information.

Now, we haven’t added any bands to this, it’s an empty band, we can add some points of interests if we wanted to, but let’s start showing how you can add additional data sources to this.

So, what we’ll need to do is that we’ll have to add these data sources. Here again, this is our Point of Interest one, but let’s import some data sources to work with.

So here, I’ve got a Valves data source, and I’ve got a Risk data source. So, this is a point feature, and here you can see this is an underlying URL to the ArcGIS rest endpoint, the ObjectID is a unique field. It needs to have a RouteID field to match our Centerline Layer. And as you fill this information out, it will build this Definition Query, and you can also modify that if you needed to.

Now, a linear feature here is going to require a Begin and an End measure value, so that we can determine the Begin point and Endpoint for visualizing that inside of Geocortex Inline.

So, once you have data sources, let’s add a new band. We can give that a name, let’s call this ‘Valves’, we can give it a short name as ‘VLV’, change the Accent Color if we wanted to. There’s a lot of other different configurations options here which I don’t have time to touch on, but you can make it resizable, movable, so that the end-users can move it around and so on. We can stylize the Tooltip, labels, and so on, but let’s begin adding some charts to this band. Here, you can see that you can add multiple charts, but let’s add a Valves chart.

It’s going to ask me to ‘Select a data source’, I’m interested in my Valves layer. Here, you can either specify a Y Value Field from the rest endpoint to determine how the data is going to be symbolized on a Y-axis. In this scenario, I just want to see where the valves are along my pipeline. I’m just going to enter in an arbitrary value of O.

Then, we can see that it’s a point feature, so we want to add it as a Scatter Chart, or Scatter Plot, and then here we can also add some Tooltip Text Function as well.

So, I’m going to just use a little cheat sheet here and paste in a Tooltip function.

Now, this is using I believe using Javascript, and again I am not a Javascript developer, but it is a pretty simple notation, I believe there are plans for making this simpler for end-users, but at the moment, right now, you’ll have to use a Javascript function. Really what this is doing, is that it’s going to ‘Return the Diameter’ attribute for the rest endpoint and then add an ‘Inch’ to the end of that and also add the ‘Valve Type’, which again is an attribute from the rest endpoint.

Let’s configure the chart display options here. So, it’s a valve, so maybe I want a symbolize it as valves. Change the color of it, make it black, maybe increase the Symbol Size, and I’m pretty happy with that.

So, let’s go run this in the Sandbox. I can just refresh this. I haven’t even saved anything. Let’s select our end measure, and begin measure here, and now you can see were visualizing the underlying valves along our linear reference pipeline.

We can see that it’s saying that the diameter with inch and then the valve type. Now you can see that there’s two here, one’s called ‘Gate’ and one’s called ‘Check’, and that one is ‘Gate’ as well.

Let’s see the process of adding a linear referenced a band that has a begin and end measure value. I could add a chart to this band, or I could just add an additional band with a single chart on it.

So, let’s do that. Let’s add another new band here. Let’s call this maybe ‘Integrity’, or ‘Risk’, let’s call this ‘RSK’, let’s make it red, and let’s again add some charts to this band. Here, we can add our chart, select our ‘Risk’ data source.

In this scenario, because we are dealing with risk, we want to visualize the segments along this pipeline based on their associated risks. So, we’re going to want the Y Value to be the risk attribute. So here, I can type ‘RISK’, and again it’s going to be an attribute in your ArcGIS rest end-point. You can also apply some Javascript functions if you wanted to, to change that.

In this scenario, let’s make it a Linear Chart. Here, we can also add a Text Function as well. So, this is another Javascript function where we are saying we’re outputting the ‘Risk’, the associated ‘Risk Attribute’, the ‘Potential Failure’, and the ‘Consequent of Failure’. Again, you can play around the underlying visualization of that.

Here, we can also determine the line color. Here, if I was to check these random colors, anytime there’s a break in the Risk Value, it’ll just change the color. Let’s use Javascript function to dynamically or manually determine the underlying colors for our segment here.

Here, we are just creating a variable called ‘Risk’ which is the value of the Risk Attribute from the rest end-point. And we are saying if that is greater than 70, we are going to specify it as this color, otherwise, if it is greater than 30, we’ll specify it as this color. Lastly, if none of those options are true then we are going to specify it as this color and we can increase the line if we wanted to as well.

We can also Show a Label if we wanted to. Let’s just use this as a label for fun, just to show the risk, and let’s save this, or we don’t have to save this, we can just run it.

Let’s select our begin and end measure, and here you can see now, we are showing the Potential Failure, the Consequent Failure, and again this is being symbolized based on that Javascript Expression that we applied. And then, we are also showing that label as well within Inline.

So that hopefully gives you an idea of how to build these linear referencing views with the Inline Designer and how to deploy that in your Geocortex Essentials, Web AppBuilder, and Geocortex Web Applications. Bye for now!”

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