Off-Panel Widget Loaded On Startup Causes Render Issues (Portal Web App)

[RyanCoodey]

Years ago we created some widgets and hosted with Portal for ArcGIS 10.6 (not AppBuilder directly). Recently we upgraded Portal to 10.8.1 and thought everything was fine. But just found a temperamental issue with our off-panel widget that is set to open on web app startup from the Anchor Bar. In IE the issue is very noticeable and in Chrome and Edge it is more subtle but still there. Please see the attached screenshots for what the issue looks like. The widget works fine when toggled off and on, or if not set to open on startup. But we want this widget to open on startup as it does a query to set the maps initial time extent.

Things tried and didn’t work:

• Different initial event functions: startup, postCreate, setPosition, onOpen, etc.
• Making sure map created events trigger first
• Dynamically injecting the widget’s html at runtime
• innerHTML
• html.place
• Dynamically injecting html after an asynchronous delay causes no visuals to be rendered
• Striping out CSS and other position related styles
• Another newer widget also has the same issue when set to open on load, so its newer uses on dojo dijit not helping

Potential workarounds (not crazy about any):

• Place the widget in one of the non Anchor Bar slots
• Could create a separate widget with no visuals that initializes the maps time. Then the user would need to open this Time Slider window manually

Also, I know there is a Time Slider widget out of the box from ESRI and wish we could use it. But needed this custom version to set the maps initial time and also the slider notches based off a lookup from a mosaic dataset. The dates need to be dynamic over a 2 year period based on the data.

Thanks for any help or ideas!