I developed an ExB app that focuses most of its capabilities on two rather large feature classes. One is about 800K features, the other about 1.6M features. The smaller layer is created by aggregating the larger based on a shared attribute value and spatial proximity of the features to each other. The bulk of the beneficial capabilities of the app relate to filtering the features in either layer (whichever is more useful to the specific user) to narrow down the features to an appropriate number. Work is then done on those filtered features.
The filters for the two layers are essentially the same. For each layer there are 6 filters, with a total of 46 clauses across the filters. Some of those clauses have predefined choice lists of from 18-72 options. Creating the filters for one of the layers is tedious but not difficult. The real tedium is when creating the SAME filters for the second layer. Again, another 6 filters with 46 clauses and several long choice lists. Another aspect of this app is that there is at least one major update to the underlying data each year. And we continue to enhance the fields contained in the data. So I typically "start from scratch" and create a new ExB for each data "version." It would save many hours of time to be able to export filter configurations into some sort of text format, and then import them to for use in another layer in the same ExB, or for a parallel layer in another ExB altogether. This functionality would also reduce errors that occur due to the tedious nature of entering all the clauses and pick lists. The other big benefit of export/import of filter configurations is that I could then make the modest alterations for a new data version to the text files of the filter configurations, and import them, rather than have to create the entire list of filters and clauses from scratch. Thanks for considering.
