Select/Edit widgets do not respect floor filter.

[JDenham]

This week I discovered what appears to be a bug in ExB with the Select and Edit widgets when working with indoors (floor aware) layers.  The floor filter allows you to choose a building and floor, and then filters all other buildings/floors off.  We currently get this functionality in WAB using an unofficial floor filter widget, and one of the primary functions that we rely on (for billing, space planning etc.) is making custom selections and quickly querying those for square footage. 

I was doing some testing this last week for our inevitable move to ExB, when I discovered that this isn't working properly in ExB.  It appears that in our version of Enterprise (11.3), the Select widget is not respecting the levels filtered by the floor filter.  If I make a choice in the floor filter widget, then select rooms with either the Edit tool or Select widget, the selection will highlight the room on my current floor, but the selection set will include all rooms both above and below that were touched by my selection window.

The only workaround I've found (which is not reasonable to ask of our customers) is to also use the Filter widget on the room polygon layer in addition to the floor filter before using the select widget to make the desired selection.  The Filter widget is less user friendly for quick queries, and in the way we use it does not filter the detail layer along with the room polygons, so toggling floors this way would involved a back and forth between the floor filter and filter widget for each change.

I have an open ticket with support, but their initial response indicated that this may be new knowledge to them.   I'm curious to know if there are any other users who can test this and confirm that it is truly a problem, or if there is a solution that we (and perhaps support) are not aware of.

-Jeremy

[GauravJobanputra]

Hello Jeremy,

Thanks for the detailed post. At Enterprise 11.3 and 11.4, the Floor Filter widget behaves as a Map-centric widget so your observations are as expected. For Enterprise 11.5, the widget is being enhanced to reflect the floor selection in other Data-centric widgets that have the same data source as the floor aware indoor map. Apart from the Select widget, may I know what other widgets do you plan to use in Experience Builder along with a floor-aware map?

- Gaurav

[JDenham]

Hi Gaurav,

Thank you for your reply.  That makes sense as an explanation of its behavior.  

With our current WAB apps, once the additional indoor fields are configured in the data (facility_id, vertical_order, facility_name), the floor filter behaves quite intuitively.  It would be wonderful if the experience builder floor filter would work in a similar way.  For example:

-When first opened, web apps (with floor filter loaded) start with no buildings selected, and only the Facility layer being displayed (building outlines only) showing their configured labels.  This allows the app to load quickly without having to render all of the Detail, Unit, and Level layers up front (regardless of zoom level).  The customer starts with a clean and uncluttered app with buildings clearly identifiable by name.

-From here, clicking within a facility polygon border will directly trigger that building to be selected in the Floor Filter widget, which of course zooms to the building, toggles on the building's associated layers, and toggles off the Facility label for that building (which would otherwise be in the way of the Detail lines and Unit labels).  Labels for the buildings not selected stay on.  From here, all associated Edit, Select, Table, Batch Edit etc. (data-centric) widgets will only interact with the selected building/floor.  Zooming out a bit and clicking on any other building will immediately toggle the Floor Filter to that new building.

-This function, that allows users to click a polygon directly to activate the Floor Filter widget, is a significant time saver.  In a map that includes over 120 buildings, many within a reasonably small area, being able to select a building without having to scroll or search the list within the Floor Filter really helps.

-Once in a building, our current users generally carry out fairly simple tasks.  This includes using the edit or batch attribute editor to populate or update their room data.  They also frequently filter rooms by various attributes using the Filter widget and/or select various combinations of Unit (room) polygons for quick square footage data using the Select widget's statistics tool or exporting the filtered CSV from the table.

I hope this provides some context for how we use our current WAB applications, and how we would like to use our ExB applications.

-Jeremy

[JDenham]

@GauravJobanputra 

I should also mention that the ability to closely replicate this workflow is critical to our needs on campus.  We are frequently identifying new ways to leverage these enterprise web apps for departments on campus, and the inclusion of widgets that are intuitive, predictable, and efficient is going to be vital for user acceptance.  I have been thrilled to provide this kind of 'indoors' functionality using the older WAB tools, and despite some app limitations, our users have been very appreciative.  As I understand it, the last version of Enterprise to offer WAB will also be the very first version of Enterprise to (hopefully) deliver these foundational pieces (Data-centric Floor Filtering, Batch attribute editing etc.).

-Jeremy