Neophyte trying to understand how to embed flex in our website

IanCooke

So we are a little watershed group that uses arcview and wants to create an interactive map and embed it in our website.

So was looking at ArcGIS online and saw the flex viewer thing, and thought "absolutely fabulous." But then I discovered that I can't display the data (layer packages) that I have uploaded to My Content in an arcgis online map, and of course we don't have our own arcgis server which means I'm stuck in terms of using the flex stuff right?

However there's a chance I could find a friend to host my data on their public arcgis server (instead of uploading it to my content) in which case I might be able to make it work, right?

Also, I'm a bit unclear on the requirements of the Flex stuff. After I download the Flex templates and widgets and such, do I install them I install on my web server i.e. my basic cheapo shared web hosting account. Or do the flex things also need to be hosted on my friend's public ArcGIS server?

Thanks!

BjornSvensson

...do I install [that Flex Viewer stuff] on my web server i.e. my basic cheapo shared web hosting account. Or do the flex things also need to be hosted on my friend's public ArcGIS server?

The Flex Viewer gets installed wherever you have your application (not your ArcGIS Server data), i.e. in this case the "cheapo ... account".

Basically, the Flex Viewer (like other applications built with Flex/Javascript/Silverlight), connects to the services on the ArcGIS Server (using the server's REST endpoint), but there is no need for anything Flex specific on the ArcGIS Server.

The only "gotcha" is that if you want Flex (or Silverlight) applications to access data from a different domain than where the application itself is hosted, then the ArcGIS Server needs to have a crossdomain.xml to allow this. See http://help.arcgis.com/en/webapi/flex/help/index.html#references/using_crossdomain_xml.htm for more info.