If you’re looking for a quick and simple way to utilize different types of symbols in your web map geometries, there is a cool little way to do this by combing Geocortex Workflow with the ArcGIS symbol playground
By using symbol playground application, you can experiment with creating different types of symbols, and modify their colors and shapes so that your geometries are displayed in whatever fashion they need to be to more clearly deliver information to your end users.
In this Geocortex Tech Tip video, we are going to show you how to do this in detail, while also demonstrating a few different examples of how you can make your geometries look more unique.
Video Transcript
“Hi, my name is Ryan Cooney. When you use Geocortex Workflow to add a geometry to the map, there are activities that allow you to control the symbology of that geometry. Today, I’m going to show you how to use the ArcGIS symbol playground to quickly and easily create symbols so you can get those geometries looking exactly the way you want. Let’s have a look!
To get started, we are going to need a workflow that can add geometries to the map. If you got one that’s great, but if not, you can go to ‘File’, ‘New’, and there is a sample here called ‘Add Graphics to Map 2’, that’s going to let us do that. This is available in the product, and what this workflow does is that it presents a form. In this case, with the geometry picker that’s going to select a point. We then create a symbol from a JSON definition of a symbol. We create a feature out of the geometry that we captured out of the user and that symbol, and finally, add it to the map.
If we were to take a look at the sandbox, just understand how it’s going to work. We’ll run this workflow, add my shape, click a point on the map, and submit. We can see here, that it adds a little picture marker symbol, which in this case is a little JavaScript icon.
So, if we want to change the symbol here, what we’re going to do is we are going to change this symbol from JSON activity and we are going to change its definition.
We can see here that there’s just this JSON definition, a URL, some sizes, and things like that. The question is, how do we come up with these simple definitions in JSON, and is there a tool that can help us do that? Of course, there is!
First hit on Google for ‘ArcGIS symbol playground’ will get you there and this has a live application that we can work with and what this application is going to do, is that it’s going to present some options for creating the various types of symbols that are possible.
So, since we are dealing with points at the moment, marker symbols are what we need. If I pick the simple marker symbol, as you can see, I have some tools here that allow me to modify this particular symbol right here, this circle. I can make it a square, I can rotate it, I can make it bigger, and I change what it looks like. Let’s just make it kind of red and modify the outline.
Red symbol, with a blue outline. Once we’ve got it looking the way that we would like, we go down to the bottom here, where it tells us the definition.
By default, it’s describing the JavaScript syntax that you would need to create this. We actually just want the JSON definition, which is very close, but a little different format. So, click this little ‘JSON’ button here. We can grab the whole definition of that symbol, hit Ctrl C to copy it. Go back to our workflow and we’ll just overwrite everything that we had there, hit ‘OK’, and now we can go back to the sandbox, run it again, draw another point, submit, and there’s that symbol as we’ve defined it.
That’s great for point symbols, if we want to do something to make it a little more interesting, we can do a polygon, and if we go back to this ‘Display Form’, in this particular workflow. I can just change this to capture a polygon.
Since a polygon is a different kind of feature, we need a different kind of symbol. So, we are going to have to change this from a simple marker symbol to something that is going to support polygons.
If I go back to the playground and just hit back, I can now select a fill symbol type. So that’s what polygons use by this symbol or the picture one. I’m going to select simple and we can come up with a different scheme here.
Let’s go with a green symbol and change the outline here, let’s make it a dashed outline and make that blue. Again, once we’ve got it looking the way we want, we select JSON, copy that content, back to this activity, and overwrite the simple definition, and we can run it in the sandbox again.
This time we are going to be drawing a polygon, hit ‘Submit’ and there we have it. That’s our symbol.
That’s what I wanted to show today, just a simple way to customize the symbology that you’re using for our geometries when you’re adding a geometry to the map as part of a workflow. So, have a look at the ArcGIS symbol playground.”
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