topic Best practice for creating the same EXB app in various environments in ArcGIS Experience Builder Questions

Best practice for creating the same EXB app in various environments

ChenChen4 — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 19:53:23 GMT

I am wondering whether my current approach aligns with Esri’s best practices. We have multiple ArcGIS Enterprise environments: DEV, QA, and PROD. As the names imply, I typically start building an Experience Builder (Exb) app in the DEV environment, then move on to QA, and finally deploy to PROD.

Each Exb app includes map services and web map components. Currently, my workflow is to create the Exb app from scratch in DEV. If everything works as expected, I then clone my web map in QA and update the URLs in the config.json to point to the QA layers and services. This way, I do not need to recreate the Exb app in QA, only update the URLs.

I would like to gather feedback to determine if this is a good practice, or if there is a better approach I should consider.

Re: Best practice for creating the same EXB app in various environments

DEWright_CA — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 23:55:51 GMT

This is a key question that I raise every year at the UC, support for SDLC type flows is critical in a mature enterprise GIS.

Re: Best practice for creating the same EXB app in various environments

DougBrowning — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 14:25:15 GMT

We have had little luck swapping out URLs when moving any ExB. We had some luck with Dashboards and now it has a tool to swap out sources but I have not tried it yet.

I also saw a blurb that AI Assistant is coming to the AGOL Assistant? In the past our JSON in AGOL Assistant gets so big we cannot actually save it after an edit so not sure they will help.

We also want this so we can clone projects for each our 12 states we cover. But after years of testing we tend to just build each one by hand, which is a crazy amount of clicks, but it works.

Re: Best practice for creating the same EXB app in various environments

ChenChen4 — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 17:52:41 GMT

Thanks both for the information. I'll ask Esri's tech support if I go to the Dev summit this year. Will share my finidings.

Re: Best practice for creating the same EXB app in various environments

MappyIan — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 10:54:30 GMT

We're early on in our ExB journey but this exact issue came up recently as we are about to deploy our first ExB app in the wild. I'd be interested to hear if you get advice/info from the Dev Summit @ChenChen4.

Re: Best practice for creating the same EXB app in various environments

ChenChen4 — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 13:46:05 GMT

Sure, I'll share my findings if I go to the Dev Summit this year 🙂