topic Will there be an Identify Widget for WAB in Web AppBuilder Custom Widgets Questions

Will there be an Identify Widget for WAB

BarnabyRockwell — Mon, 15 Dec 2014 19:57:10 GMT

Hi Robert,

Off the top of your head, will there be a customizable Identify widget available for WAB Developer Edition like your widget for Flex? Looking at the online-only WAB (non-developer) tools, there is nothing close to an ID widget, which I MUST HAVE. Obviously I need one which works for thematic rasters as well as attributed vector-based feature classes. Will you have to come to our rescue yet again and make us an awesome ID tool? Or will ESRI have one built in?

Best regards,

Barnaby

Re: Will there be an Identify Widget for WAB

RobertScheitlin__GISP — Mon, 15 Dec 2014 20:56:18 GMT

Barnaby,

I would say no that esri will not be coming out with an identify widget. Based on my conversations with esri development team members there has been a shift away from a general identify everything type of tool, towards just setting up popups for specific layers that you want info on.

I do not hold to this shift in thinking and will likely develop an Identify widget for WAB. I don't have a projection on when I can even start this work yet though.

Re: Will there be an Identify Widget for WAB

BarnabyRockwell — Mon, 15 Dec 2014 21:08:27 GMT

Thanks for the info, Robert. What you say is the direction in which ESRI is moving with regard to ID capability is very, very disheartening. If an app has only a few layers, then configuring pop-ups is no problem. But for an app with hundreds of layers? And at present, there is no way to configure pop-ups for thematic raster layers. Has ESRI even considered how to handle identify for raster layers? Or are we supposed to vectorize everything? App performance using vectorized rasters is drastically slower than just rasters, and requires caching. This is a mission critical problem for me. I don't know what ESRI is thinking, and have been wondering this since there was no ID tool built into Flex. After seeing WAB, I wish they would bring back the old .NET app, which had everything I need built in, including ID capability.