idea Enable Business Analyst Web to Use Different Locator than Portal Default in ArcGIS Business Analyst Ideas

Enable Business Analyst Web to Use Different Locator than Portal Default

GBacon — Thu, 08 May 2025 13:05:03 GMT

Currently, Business Analyst (BA) Web uses the enterprise portal default locator for address searches. This has resulted in our organization setting the USA locator as our portal default when we would rather have our own custom locator set as the default. A BUG affecting portal 11.1 through 11.3 BA Web's ability to recognize a change in portal default locator has further complicated this.

I would like to suggest the BA Web preferences to configure an organization-wide locator setting independent of the portal default. Preferences>>General>>Settings or Organization tab perhaps? (see attached)

Re: Enable Business Analyst Web to Use Different Locator than Portal Default - Status changed to: Needs Clarification

DanielStauning — Thu, 08 May 2025 17:20:18 GMT

The BA web application will discover the available locators from the portal's utility services when the app is launched. Have you shared your locator as a geocode service and configured it within the portal following these steps?

Re: Enable Business Analyst Web to Use Different Locator than Portal Default

GBacon — Thu, 08 May 2025 17:30:40 GMT

Thanks for your reply, Daniel. Yes, I've gone through that configuration and a few calls with tech support, who pointed me to this bug for 11.1 to 11.3:

To recap our conversation, the behavior we are seeing with custom locators unable to find locations in ArcGIS Business Analyst web app is due to a known defect which currently effects 11.1 to 11.3.

BUG-000169183 - The error message "A location couldn't be found for the following address" is returned when searching in the ArcGIS Business Analyst web app.

Status - In Review

Even without the bug, I think it would be helpful to configure the BA Web App locator independently of the portal default to use our addresses.

Re: Enable Business Analyst Web to Use Different Locator than Portal Default

DanielStauning — Thu, 08 May 2025 18:17:08 GMT

Adding a preference for the default locator is good idea and something we can certainly consider. Can you clarify, when you configured your custom locator as a geocode service and tried to find a location in the BA web app, you received an error? Something that may be worth trying is to experiment with the order of the locators in the utility services configuration page. E.g.- you can drag your custom locator to the top of the list.

Re: Enable Business Analyst Web to Use Different Locator than Portal Default

GBacon — Thu, 08 May 2025 19:11:34 GMT

Daniel,

That is what I did with ESRI Support and I used browser developer tools to show that the BA web app was not respecting the change in locator. The bug doesn't mention that, but the support person indicated that was the heart of the problem. Anyhow, that case is closed since the bug has been logged.

Re: Enable Business Analyst Web to Use Different Locator than Portal Default

JohnSauvageau1 — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 19:05:46 GMT

I am experiencing similar issues with BA Web App. I have ordered our organization locator (USA) as the first in the list of geocoding services. When trying to add data from file within BA Web App, it says we are not configured for Batch Geocoding.

When adding the same file within the Maps tab within ArcGIS Portal, we are able to successfully geocode the table then import the layer into BA Web App. Is this what we should be doing or is there something we are missing within BA Web App to geocode the file within the app...

Re: Enable Business Analyst Web to Use Different Locator than Portal Default

DanielStauning — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 22:11:33 GMT

@JohnSauvageau1

When adding the locator to the portal utility services, is this Allow batch geocoding option toggled on?