How to Filter an Embedded Dashboard in Experience Builder using the Search Widget?

Question

I'm working with an ArcGIS Dashboard containing a layer with approximately 12,000 points, and I'm facing significant performance issues with the Category Selector widget. The Problem: The Category Selector widget needs to display a list of unique property owners. Since there are around 5,000 unique owners in the dataset, I increased the "Maximum categories" setting accordingly. However, with this setting, the dashboard freezes for several minutes upon loading and often becomes unresponsive. My understanding is that the widget performs very intensive attribute queries against the feature service to build this complete list of 5,000 unique values during initialization, which is causing the performance bottleneck. I know that ArcGIS Experience Builder's Search Widget handles large datasets more efficiently because it uses targeted, on-demand server-side queries instead of pre-loading the entire list of unique values. Proposed Solution & Question: My plan is to embed my existing ArcGIS Dashboard into a new Experience Builder application. I can’t recreate the dashboard directly in Experience Builder since it’s still missing some of the features that Dashboards provide. I will remove the slow Category Selector from the dashboard itself and use Experience Builder's Search Widget to control filtering through URL parameters. I need to configure the Experience Builder Search Widget and the Embed Widget so that when a user searches for an owner's name: * The search input gets passed to the embedded dashboard via URL parameters through the Embed Widget's dynamic URL configuration. * The embedded dashboard reads this URL parameter and filters the map and all other dashboard elements (charts, tables, etc.) to show only the data for that specific owner. For example, searching for "Sam Walton" should filter the dashboard to display all multiple sites he owns, while searching for "Joe Dirt" would show his single site. Could someone that knows how to do this be willing to help me out with instructions, screenshots, sometype of youtube video or willing to point me towards one of these or a tutorial demonstrating how to set up this interaction between the Search Widget and an embedded Dashboard using URL parameters? Any help showing the proper configuration would be greatly appreciated! Also I am using ArcGIS Enterprise 11.4. PS, sorry if this ends up sounding a bit stiff. I had AI help me clean up the grammar, and now it reads a little too much like it was written by AI. That said, it does capture my problem perfectly 🙂 Of course! Here is the revised update with that new call-to-action included. UPDATE: First off, thanks to everyone who took a look at this, and at the time of this post update I only had one response from " JeffreyThompson2 " and I think him for the advice and I wanted to share my journey and the final outcome for anyone who might run into a similar issue in the future. I went ahead with the plan to embed my Dashboard in Experience Builder and use the Search widget to pass a URL parameter. After a lot of configuration, I got it partially working, but I ultimately ran into two major roadblocks that made the solution unworkable: * The Blank Dashboard Problem: The embedded dashboard was completely blank on the initial load. It would only appear after I performed a search and selected a result. This happened because the Embed widget was configured to use the "Selected features" data view to build its URL. With no initial selection, the URL parameter was empty, resulting in a broken link (...#current_controller_name=). * Un-grouped Search Results: My Search widget was correctly searching the owner name field. However, when I searched for a company like "Rogers Group Inc" which owns 50+ sites, the search results would list every single one of those sites individually. I then had to click one of the sites from that long list to trigger the filter. While the dashboard did correctly filter to show all 50 Rogers Group sites after that second click, the user experience of a two-step selection was clunky and not what I was aiming for. I tried several different workarounds, including various dynamic URL expressions and switching to the "Embed by Code"

Ashish_Kumar1 · Answer

Hi Jon,

I am facing the similar issue to find out a solution relating the Exp builder with embedded dashboards. The only issue with me is i need to use logarithmic charts for soil resistivity which is not possible in Exp builder, so here is my limitation to rely on 2 apps.

I would really appreciate if you can guide me towards any links or tutorials which can help me achieve the results.

Thank you very much for your help.

JonJones1 · Answer

Hey Nicole,

Thank you so much for the detailed suggestions, and my apologies for the delayed reply. I really appreciate you taking the time to share those ideas for both of my roadblocks.

To close the loop, I ultimately decided to switch paths and rebuild the application natively within Experience Builder. Speed and reliability are critical for this project, and it felt like the most stable path forward rather than continuing to work through the embedding issues.

I did give your first suggestion a try for the "Blank Dashboard Problem". I am almost certain this is user error on my end, but I couldn't get it to work. After I enabled the "View for empty selection" on the data source, the embedded dashboard still wouldn't appear on the initial load. The entire widget just showed up as a blank space. It wasn't just a map failing to load; the entire dashboard was missing.

Here are a few screenshots of my configuration and what I was seeing:

Since I couldn't get past that "first boss fight," I never made it to the "second boss fight" to try your excellent suggestion for the "Un-grouped Search Results" issue.

Again, I really appreciate you trying to help a bumbling user like me navigate this. Thank you!

(A quick note for the Esri team):

First off, thank you for creating such powerful and flexible tools. I believe there's a great opportunity here to help users who are in a similar situation to me. Many of us have well-established Dashboards but are increasingly looking to Experience Builder for its modern capabilities, like the powerful Search widget.

A tutorial or blog post showing the best way to make these two amazing products work together would be a fantastic resource for the community. It would truly help bridge the gap as we transition and grow with the platform. Thanks for listening!

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NicoleJohnson · Answer

I have some ideas after your update if you'd still want to tinker with this (or somebody in the future sees this).

Blank dashboard problem: You can enable a view for an empty selection. This makes it so the user sees something before having to make a selection. You can set this through the Data tab:

Ungrouped search results: You could create a view of your data that groups the unique property owner names. You would have that data in your search, then set your search selection action to also select on your un-grouped data that's actually in the dashboard. Here's a tutorial on creating the view (it shows a bit more than grouping, but it has the layer definition code you'd need to get started).