Experince Builder Newbie Question for Button

[GISREAL]

Hello. I am new to Experience Builder and having great but frustrating fun. I have a Splash screen that I would like to relocate to an ABOUT Button. I am not sure how to resolve this. Not sure if I can connect the Splash screen to the Button or make a text box instead. (See Attachment)  After a full day of trying, I decided to post here. If you could help, I would really appreciate it.

Thank you

[jcarlson · Accepted solution]

You should be able to link the button to a Window instead of a page, then select the splash window.

[GISREAL]

Exactly what I was thinking. Please look at the attachment.

[ShengdiZhang · Accepted solution]

Hi @GISREAL ,

There are two types of windows, fixed and anchored, and a fixed window can be set as a splash window or a page window.

You can link a button widget to an anchored or fixed window except for splash.

Doc can found at: https://doc.arcgis.com/en/experience-builder/build-apps/add-windows.htm#LI_385FC6AC51924A4ABD459A771...

If you want to link your button to the same window, you can duplicate your splash window and link the button to the duplicated one.

Shengdi

[GISREAL]

Great!. I looked everywhere for documentation. Thank you so much

[DaveFullerton]

@ShengdiZhang, you can link a button to a fixed window and then set the window as the splash screen as seen here:

https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/31311cc6914341d7a7f02a8b590b0619/

That is what I ended up doing in an update to an Experience I am working on.  I wasn't consciously trying to work around this limitation.  It sounds like your team doesn't want us to do that.  Could it lead to problems?  Will you be preventing that possibility in future versions?

[ShengdiZhang]

@DaveFullerton 

Splash is a very special type of window with different ways of storing and judging. You can set a button link to a splash window and it will not be prevented in future releases. Usually, it doesn't cause problems, but it's not recommended.

[DaveFullerton]

Good to know @ShengdiZhang!  I am going to keep it as is and see how it goes.

Our use case is simple.  We have the Search widget in the splash screen, no other windows, and only 2 pages.  User enters an address in the splash screen and that sends the user to page 0.  A button there can take them back to the splash if they need to enter a different address (not likely). 

Page 0 has a custom widget that uses the output data from the search widget to do spatial queries.  I didn't want to have to figure out how to make it work with the output from 2 Search widgets.

The other alternative seemed to be to not set the window as splash and to set our links to the app to include the parameters (?dlg=dialog_1) for the window in the URL, but the URL for the window would not be what people would be likely to bookmark in their browsers.  And this is an update, so many users have already bookmarked it.

We are running IIS and I suppose something could be tweaked in the settings there to get it to do it without setting the window as splash.  I would rather not have to deal with that.

[ShengdiZhang]

@DaveFullerton 

Hi, your case is a little different. When a window closes, widgets in the window are destroyed, which should also cause the output data source generated by the widgets to be destroyed.

Your case is working because the current search widget has a bug that cannot correctly destroy the output data source when the widget is destroyed.

There are two workarounds:

One is to put the Search widget on the homepage and show search results on the Page 0, the button can be set back to the home page.

The other one is to put the Search widget in a widget controller and set the Search widget opens on loading.

[DaveFullerton]

Another option would be to add another page, put the search widget on the new page (link it to what is now the home page), and set the new page to be the home page, right?