Problems with API 4 beta running in a Windows Store application WebView

AustinMulder — Fri, 07 Aug 2015 08:02:02 GMT

Hi,

I was trying to get the official Create 2D Map sample running with the offline distribution of the API inside of a WebView in a Windows Store application.

It turned out to be a non-trivial task and I needed to make a few changes to the official API distribution to get the sample working.

Most of the problems were related to the URL scheme/protocol ms-appx-web: used by Windows Store applications’ WebViews.

Let’s start with the installation.

According to the official install.htm one should replace

[HOSTNAME_AND_PATH_TO_JSAPI]

with

<myserver>/arcgis_js_api/library/4.0beta1/4.0beta1/

That was not working for me at the first attempt so I decided to modify the entire baseUrl property.

I replaced

baseUrl:(location.protocol === 'file:' ? 'http:' : location.protocol) + '//' + "[HOSTNAME_AND_PATH_TO_JSAPI]dojo"

with

baseUrl:"arcgis_js_api/library/4.0beta1/4.0beta1/“

I’ve used the same trick also with the API version 3.14 a few months ago.

After I got the baseUrl property right the API started to load but it failed to get the basemap. The exception I was getting was “The system cannot locate the resource specified.” The problem was that the API was trying to get the basemap from an invalid URL

ms-appx-web://00000000-0000-4444-0000-000000000000/SampleApp/ms-appx-web://services.arcgisonline.com/ArcGIS/rest/services/World_Street_Map/MapServer

instead of

http://services.arcgisonline.com/ArcGIS/rest/services/World_Street_Map/MapServer

I managed to trace this problem back to a getabsoluteurl(a) method in init.js file.

It is incorrectly determining the URL scheme. It recognizes http and https only.

I fixed my problem my replacing a regular expression

/^https?:\/\//i

with

(https?|ms-appx-web)

This changed moved me one step further to another exception. This time it was complaining about

ms-appx-web://services.arcgisonline.com/ArcGIS/rest/services/World_Street_Map/MapServer?f=json&callback=dojo.io.script.jsonp_dojoIoScript1._jsonpCallback

See that it’s again using the ms-appx-web scheme instead of http. I couldn’t find the place where this URL is being built.

I helped myself by prepending

http:

//services.arcgisonline.com/ArcGIS/rest/services/World_Street_Map/MapServer

in init.js.

For some reason I had to do the same trick for

//elevation3d.arcgis.com/arcgis/rest/services/WorldElevation3D/Terrain3D/ImageServer

Finally it all started to work and the basemap loaded and displayed correctly.

I know that my changes are not the best ones. I made just to move forward to get the sample running. They are not complex and I do not know what side effects they might have that I’ll run into later when I’ll start migrating our existing Windows Store application built with API 3.14.

It would help me a lot if there was an official support for this type of deployment in the future API 4 releases.

Re: Problems with API 4 beta running in a Windows Store application WebView

KristianEkenes — Tue, 11 Aug 2015 17:58:36 GMT

Austin,

Thanks for posting the suggestion. This will be discussed and evaluated in the near future.

Re: Problems with API 4 beta running in a Windows Store application WebView

ReneRubalcava — Tue, 25 Aug 2015 15:45:05 GMT

Austin Mulder do you have a basic sample app I can test this with? I'm pretty new to Windows Store Universal Apps and trying to debug this issue.

You can email me if you like rrubalcava at odoe.net

Thanks!

topic Re: Problems with API 4 beta running in a Windows Store application WebView in ArcGIS JavaScript Maps SDK Questions

Problems with API 4 beta running in a Windows Store application WebView

Re: Problems with API 4 beta running in a Windows Store application WebView

Re: Problems with API 4 beta running in a Windows Store application WebView