Hello Experience Builder Community,
I have a bit of a theoretical question today. That is how do people in the community handle data federation Experience Build apps? In my own project, we have geometric data and we have text metadata. The geometry consists of polygons drawn on a map in Survey123. These wind up in a hosted feature layer when I then place in an Experience Builder app. We also have a mess of textual metadata. Most this textual data cannot go into the feature layer for a variety of reasons. For example, one to many relations and limits on the length of text fields (255 characters). So we have to store this outside of Arc GIS online. We chose to store that other data in a Digital Commons repository largely because of its support for peer review which is a big part of the project.
The feature layer underlying the Experience Builder application stores a link to the entry in digital commons corresponding to each user defined polygon. The result is an app that shows where various research projects are happening and the region covered while providing a link to the complete metadata record. We could do just about the same thing with Arc GIS Hub. This provides a pretty decent way to search for, say, projects in the South Pacific. It's just a filter records in Experience Builder. I can do more sophisticated things with a SQL style query to the feature layer. I also wrote some scripts for doing full text searches which I can place as buttons on the Experience Builder app. That all works. What I'm stuck on this: The client wants to be able to do a geographic search then refine results by a full text search. And the converse.
Have other people here bridge this kind of data divide? If so, what did you do? You can think of my project as a bibliographic database with geographic/geometric data attached. I really wish I could do something like a PostGIS database connected to a map, but on the web.
Thanks all your tips and feedback.
