Enable Actions within the Edit Widget

[Brian_Mocci]

Spent the last week brainstorming with ESRI Support Staff. 

We would benefit greatly from having actions enabled in the Edit Widget.

The proposed functionality:

• Select from a list widget a table record.
• Pass a value from a field within the selected record to the edit widget during creation of new feature.
• Utilizing the edit+map widgets, create the new feature with the passed value being assigned to a field in the new feature.

This would enable the creation of related records dynamically, in a "batch" mode, where you could create multiple points and have them immediately associated with their parent (tabular) record.

The hypothetical use case for this involves a dataset with a parent table representing "Projects" - with various fields describing the attributes of the project (cost, client, start/stop date, project type, etc), and a variety of related features representing project specific location data. With this functionality, a contributor level license could create a new "Projects" record, attribute it, and create point/line/polygon data that is associated with the parent project.

The next step would be to enable direct export of shapefiles and/or KMZ/KML files using a "Projects" level filter that would export all of the related geometries to one project.

I have staff that are currently unsatisfied with the performance and workflow of other commonly available software suites to achieve this. Seems like we are awfully close with Experience Builder - but the missing functionality in the edit widget is prohibitive.

[AlixVezina]

Hi @Brian_Mocci ,

I am curious to know if a relationship class between your parent project table layer and the asset layers would work in this case?

Feature creation supports "batch" creation of multiple features at once, and you can use Calculated expressions in Forms to automatically grab the "project" attributes and write them into the child features fields (see example 2 in this blog).

Here's a quick sample I created (this is ArcGIS Online, so it has all the latest functionality):

Web Map > Related Projects and Assets

Now, one remaining challenge is that the Edit widget in Experience Builder only supports editing table records (the Project table layer) while in "Attribute only" mode. And "Attribute mode" does not support creating the related Asset features as you can do in the Map Viewer. There may be some enhancement request for Experience Builder here; perhaps a way to launch "Add feature" from within the Table widget when the Edit widget is present as you see it in Map Viewer.

One simple workaround for this "Attribute only" mode limitation, would be to use a Feature layer (e.g., polygon or point features) instead of a Table layer for Project records. Then the Edit widget can be used in "Interact with a Map widget" mode to edit both the project and asset features, and you'll be able to create related assets for every project.

Another option, if you still need to use a Table layer for projects, could be to use the Web Editor instead. There is also a Web Editor Instant Apps template (in beta, for now) that you can configure. Example below: