idea Symbol Property Connections (Attribute-Driven Symbology) in ArcGIS Online Ideas

Symbol Property Connections (Attribute-Driven Symbology)

wayfaringrob — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 20:33:29 GMT

I would greatly appreciate the ability to use field values as symbology values, as is possible in ArcGIS Pro when checking the box for 'Allow symbol property connections.' In fact, I have a layer that uses this for color. It uses single symbol symbology, but each feature appears a different color since the hex code is stored in a table and set up to do so. When I go to publish online, though, not only does it not give any warning that this is not supported in AGO, but my features upload with a default gray appearance. The only workaround seems to be to manually set the color of each symbol class and to save that to the layer, which is still undesirable as it results in massive legends that aren't really necessary and manual labels for everything. Transparency by attribute is already an option, but there ought to be parity with Pro in this regard.

Re: Symbol Property Connections (Attribute-Driven Symbology)

RussRoberts — Wed, 25 Jan 2023 13:35:47 GMT

This is supported but we are seeing some unexpected outputs from Pro publishing side and are working with the team on getting this solved. You can log an issue with the Pro team on this for tracking.

Here is an example I made after making some manual edits to the web map using 3 fields with rgb values

https://jsapi.maps.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?webmap=bcda0069313e43e8a63800c250b8bd84

Re: Symbol Property Connections (Attribute-Driven Symbology)

wayfaringrob — Wed, 25 Jan 2023 16:36:06 GMT

@RussRobertsthanks, where do you go to configure that? I only see the option to vary transparency:

Re: Symbol Property Connections (Attribute-Driven Symbology)

RussRoberts — Wed, 25 Jan 2023 16:40:33 GMT

Sorry for the confusion- manually meant I did this one through ago-assistant and wrote out some web map JSON.

First published a web map from Pro with the option to use symbols compatible with all apps unchecked in the share web map dialog. Then I made the few changes to the primitive overrides that are written under the web map JSON to align with the CIM spec and what the JSAPI which handles the map view layer drawing expects.

Re: Symbol Property Connections (Attribute-Driven Symbology)

CristianChavarini — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 21:45:44 GMT

@RussRoberts thank you very much for your contributions. I have the same problem, when publishing a service with ArcGIS Pro 3.0 in ArcGIS Enterprise 11.0 with this custom symbology, using an ARCADE expression for the color assignment, the service only respects this symbology with the map image, however, with the feature service it does not work, that is, the custom colors are not applied with the expression.
Is there any solution to this problem?

Re: Symbol Property Connections (Attribute-Driven Symbology)

RussRoberts — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 17:24:40 GMT

We did make a change in API that reads the output that Pro writes which was added in the last release of Online and I think will be part of 11.2. If you can share the Pro project I can take a look to see if some map JSON tweaks could get it to work in 11.0

Re: Symbol Property Connections (Attribute-Driven Symbology)

MatthewKing — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 17:47:35 GMT

@RussRoberts Does the "'Allow symbol property connections" work "out-of-the-box" when publishing a feature layer (or Web Map) from Pro to AGO? Meaning I don't have to go into AGO Assistant and fiddle around to make it work.

I've tried every which way but when I publish either the feature layer or map to AGO my field value symbology reverts to some default level.

Basically, just hoping for a simple yes or no answer...and if it's a Yes, what should I be looking for to make it work...ok, maybe not so simple of an answer 😁

Thanks!

Re: Symbol Property Connections (Attribute-Driven Symbology)

RussRoberts — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 18:25:52 GMT

Yup it should work. you want to make sure you are setting the expression with arcade for the symbol driven property is the main thing when authoring in Pro. Also this will only work in 4.x based apps like Map Viewer(not classic), Dashboards, Experience Builder and Instant apps. Also make sure you have "use compatible symbols" unchecked when sharing from Pro. If you can share the Pro project I can also take a look

Re: Symbol Property Connections (Attribute-Driven Symbology)

MatthewKing — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 20:22:54 GMT

@RussRoberts Thanks for the quick response. I'm not using Arcade to drive the symbology, I'm using the "Allow symbol property connections" feature which allows you to use a field to define the symbology...in this case the color. Everything else you mentioned I've followed. I'm fine with sharing the Pro project...how do I do that?

Thanks!

Re: Symbol Property Connections (Attribute-Driven Symbology)

RussRoberts — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 20:28:22 GMT

You can toss it into a group and invite russell_jsapi

Re: Symbol Property Connections (Attribute-Driven Symbology)

MatthewKing — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 20:45:53 GMT

@RussRoberts Done and hopefully I did it correctly 🙂

Re: Symbol Property Connections (Attribute-Driven Symbology)

RussRoberts — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 22:36:49 GMT

When you go to that layer in Pro click on the expression icon next to Map Color and switch the dropdown from VBScript to Arcade. Then publish the map up and it should look like the one I posted back into the group.

Re: Symbol Property Connections (Attribute-Driven Symbology)

MatthewKing — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 13:50:28 GMT

@RussRoberts Wow, big big thanks, that worked! Is that basically what you did when you used AGO-Assistant?

Another question, in Pro or AGO, or using AGO-Assistant, is there a way for the legend to reflect the color? Instead it seems that they're just some random color.

ArcGIS OnlineArcGIS Pro

Re: Symbol Property Connections (Attribute-Driven Symbology)

RussRoberts — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 14:08:22 GMT

Yup a while back as things were still being worked on across teams I had to use assistant to get the properties to be in arcade and there was 1 or 2 other areas where we on the web side weren't fully supporting. Now with the above case just using Pro (I used the latest version here) and making sure when you set the field to go through the expression builder just to explicitly set it as arcade instead of vbscript.

When using these field connected primitive overrides both clients are currently limited with the legend support and we cant extract that color. I don't have a release when this is supported unfortunately.

Re: Symbol Property Connections (Attribute-Driven Symbology)

MatthewKing — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 14:21:23 GMT

@RussRoberts bummer about your 2nd paragraph b/c that kind of stops me in my tracks. I really need the legend to reflect the trail colors. I'll submit a separate AGO Idea for that.

Thanks again for your help. While in the end I'll need to find an alternative (or do the symbology of all 130+ trails manually) this was helpful and I did learn something new.

Re: Symbol Property Connections (Attribute-Driven Symbology)

wayfaringrob — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 22:16:17 GMT

@MatthewKing it's an unfortunate limitation in ArcGIS Pro, too. You can get attribute-driven symbology, sure, but even that doesn't have full support. In addition to having an inadequate legend, you can't set symbol layer drawing either. It would be best if attribute-driven symbology would just act like normal symbology. That would be insanely useful.

Re: Symbol Property Connections (Attribute-Driven Symbology)

MatthewKing — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 16:11:49 GMT

@wayfaringrob I hear you...I'm really grateful that they have this really cool feature, but like you allude to, it's not all the way there yet.

Also, thanks for letting me highjack your post 😁

Re: Symbol Property Connections (Attribute-Driven Symbology)

A_Stan — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 15:37:41 GMT

In case it helps anyone:

I encountered this issue and wrote a little python script which uses the colour columns to manually change the layer colours, allowing you to export to AGOL.

import arcpy # Set the path to your feature layer layer_path = r"C:\......" # Create a layer object aprx = arcpy.mp.ArcGISProject("CURRENT") map = aprx.listMaps('YourMapName')[0] layer = map.listLayers("YourLayerName")[0] #Convert hexcodes to RGB def hex_to_rgb(hex_code): hex_code = hex_code.lstrip('#') rgb = [int(hex_code[i:i+2], 16) for i in (0, 2, 4)] rgb.append(100) return {'RGB': rgb} # Start an edit session with arcpy.da.Editor(layer_path) as edit: # Create an update cursor to iterate through the features with arcpy.da.UpdateCursor(layer, ["UniqueIdentifier", "Colour1", "Colour2"]) as cursor: for row in cursor: # Get the values of Colour1 and Colour2 fields colour1 = hex_to_rgb(row[1]) colour2 = hex_to_rgb(row[2]) # Modify symbology for the layer sym = layer.symbology if hasattr(sym, "renderer") and sym.renderer.type == "UniqueValueRenderer": # Update the renderer's symbol properties for group in sym.renderer.groups: for item in group.items: if item.label == row[0]: # Match the "Team" field item.symbol.color = colour1 item.symbol.outlineColor = colour2 # Apply the updated symbology to the layer layer.symbology = sym # Update the row cursor.updateRow(row) print("Colours updated successfully.")

This was used for assigning colours to football teams. The team name takes the place of UniqueIdentifier field, and the Colour1 and Colour2 fields containing hexcodes are used to give fill and outline values.