Creating Runtime Datasources in Experience Builder 1.19

[JeffreyThompson2]

I just updated to 1.19 and I have encountered a major issue with creating runtime datasources. Something has changed in the coding path as my Custom Widget was working in 1.18. I don't see anything related to this documented in the Breaking Changes. The behavior I am getting is extremely odd. The layers created this way will first load as expected then unload themselves in Preview Mode. See screen recording:

Stranger still, this does not happen in the Build Mode. The layers do not automatically unload even when using Live View and I can switch between sets of layers without issue. The advanced datasource functionality is not available in the Map Layers Widget, but the Select Widget works as expected.

I am able to use Select and send the results to a Table Widget in Live View.

I have not done much troubleshooting yet. I just wanted to get this question out so the Dev Team has something to think about over the weekend.

[ericsamson_tract]

Hey Jeffrey, somewhat unrelated but did you have issues importing 1.18 applications into 1.19? I posted about it here: 
https://community.esri.com/t5/arcgis-experience-builder-questions/can-t-import-1-18-experiences-into...

I also have a bunch of widgets that utilize runtime datasources, so probably will be broken for me when I am finally able to update.

[JeffreyThompson2]

It appears that my projects upgraded without issue. Although, a number of Widgets broke in the upgrade. In addition to the issue above, I needed to fix the import statements for all my Widgets using the Components API. I also forked off the ESRI Search Widget back in Experience Builder 1.10-1.12 and it refused to load after the update. I'm not very surprised that happened and I have not started looking into that problem at all.

I have not gotten back to troubleshooting my upgrade yet.

[JeffreyThompson2 · Accepted solution]

Well, I don't fully understand what's going on here and I don't think this solution will be helpful to anyone else, but I will try to explain what I have found the best I can.

In my Widget, I would first load a set of FeatureLayers and sometimes other layer types bundled as a GroupLayer, then loop through the GroupLayer and create Datasources for the FeatureLayers individually. This would cause two copies of the layers to load, one in a Group and the other with a Datasource. So I would remove the GroupLayer to get it back to a single copy. Was that the best way to do this? I don't know. Probably not. But it was effective in Experience Builder 1.14-18.

There was some historic reason behind the code operating this way as, I had been grouping the layers back in 1.12, but I discovered that I could not use GroupLayers as Datasources when I starting turning them into Datasources in 1.14.

In 1.19, it appears that the dataSourceJsonCreator.createDataSourceJsonByJSAPILayer() function does not work with FeatureLayers within a GroupLayer. But, you can pass the entire GroupLayer into the function and get a valid Datasource for the component layers with the layers in a GroupLayer.

It's still super weird that I am getting different results in Live View vs. Preview. I have no idea what that is about.

The version of the Widget on ESRI Community does not have this issue and appears to still work as expected.