The Near Me widget should dynamically respect the visibility state of layers as toggled in the Map Layers widget. Currently, even when a layer is hidden from view, the Near Me widget continues to query it — even with “Display all layer results, regardless of visibility” disabled. This breaks intuitive user expectations and limits dynamic workflows.
In ArcGIS Experience Builder, users often toggle layer visibility using the Map Layers widget to control what is shown on the map. However, the Near Me widget continues to include features from these hidden layers in its analysis, regardless of visibility state.
This behaviour is especially problematic when building interactive apps where users expect that hiding a layer will also exclude it from analysis. For example, if a user hides the Cattle Holdings layer, they expect Near Me to exclude it from results — but it still selects features from that layer.
Even when the “Display all layer results, regardless of visibility” option is turned off, the widget still queries hidden layers unless they are hidden in the underlying web map — which is not practical for dynamic, user-driven apps.
By default, Near Me will show results from all configured layers in the widget panel. The expectation is, users will only configure layers when they would like to see the results from those layers regardless of their visibility and this setting 'Display all layers regardless of their visibility" only turns on the layer visibility of those hidden layers in the map, so they can see the results on the map as well.
However, I understand the setting name is not clear, so we are going to update the name and information related to this setting.
Also, I will talk to our team about your proposed solutions and update here if we decide to go with it.
Thanks for your feedback, we appreciated your input.
It would be great if Esri would implement this. We have users who want to run the Near Me widget only on visible layers. It's surprising that this feature isn't already built into it.
Would like to give my backing to this idea too. We are trying to develop constraints tools where a user can select a location and a buffer and see what features intersect that buffer. Our app contains multiple layers but we want the user to be able to control what is queried by the tool through the map layer control. Selecting the layers they want and then having all layers queried regardless is quite unintuitive so this feel likes an obvious update if it could be implemented please. Thanks
You must be a registered user to add a comment. If you've already registered, sign in. Otherwise, register and sign in.