Add integrated pdf viewer (pdf preview)

[LiamHarrington-Missin]

In many cases, people have asked for me to include pdf reports into the hub exerience.  This is achievable but the user experinece is detrimentally impacted because there is no "integrated" viewer within hub.  

I upload the pdf to AGOL, link it to the hub.  However, when a user wants to view the pdf, rather than an integrated experience where the pdf is viewed from within a hub site, the pdf must be downloaded and viewed externally.  

My idea, therefore, is to enable pdf's to be viewed from within the browser much as feature services can be viewed as part of the content library experience.

[NinaRihn]

would this setting in the Hub maybe do that for you (Embedded Links)?  It is under Interactions

[LiamHarrington-Missin]

Good question @NinaRihn, Thank you

I double checked and I have that setting active.  However, you did make me wonder whether there was a work around.

You see I am hosting the pdf as an item on ArcGIS Online mostly so I can seamlessly control access.  If I hosted the pdf on an external site then maybe I could use Iframe to "embed" the pdf in a page, but that defeats the restricted access feature that i need.  

Checking this, I also can't "preview" the pdf in AGOL either.  E.g. there is no "visualisation" tab for the item, so this might actually be more challenging idea to implement than I first thought. 

[BrianRollison]

@LiamHarrington-Missin thank you for posting this, we have received some ad-hoc inquiries relative to this scenario recently. Rendering PDFs uploaded to ArcGIS Online within a layout or on a document view was an out-of-the-box feature of ArcGIS Hub for a number of years.

Unfortunately, due to an upstream change in how PDFs are stored within portal we are unable to display them within a player. You can learn more about the rationale behind this from this thread in the ArcGIS Online board:

https://community.esri.com/t5/arcgis-online-questions/unable-to-open-pdf-in-agol-only-download-new-a...

ArcGIS Hub is evaluating changes needed on our end to smooth over workflows.

[TPB_COGGIS_Team]

The whole point of Hub pages is to share information, and much of the content orgs publish are standard documents, a lot of the time as PDF. It is confusing and disruptive to a reader to have one content item in Hub behave one way (show PDF, content added previously) and another a completely different way (download only, content added now). Both of these are PDF items-- to a user of a Hub site the experience is expected to be the same. 

We should not have to re-message how our data are available beause Esri continually changes the way they 'enhance' their product. I now have to message why some PDF you can see and others you cannot, on top of explaining why some layers are not available for download natively when you access that item in a Open Data/Hub page. The latter change is really disruptive to sharing data in an organized way- having to publish each layer just to get a straight download is not a workflow for many of us- yet according to the Hub blog - this was what users wanted......

what we want is a consistent and reliable product that enhances the exprience without taking away functionality and options that have existed, and work for many of us. Innovation is great but at the expense of things that work. Give us options on how to change the way we share and not force us to change very established products

[BradCarone]

At our organization, we have a 'public' file server where the pdf's, and other documents, live. I then connect the file url to the hub to access the pdf via the browser. 

It's not as pretty as the Gallery Cards but you can link the document url to an image to give it a similar look. 

In the example attached, I've created an accordion with links to pdf documents stored on the file server.

 

Result:

[TPB_COGGIS_Team]

Thank you-- that is basically what I am doing as much as I can, tie into my organization's CMS to find the content. It is not a system set up for easy identification of files, but it is better than copying everythying to my server and using that as the repository. 

[HollyTorpey_LSA]

We really need in-browser PDF viewing functionality back. Our internal map gallery now offers an extremely degraded user experience that is frustrating our users and costing us time and storage (from all those downloaded PDFs that people forget to delete after viewing). Not to mention that all the other information that appears on the page that opens when a user clicks on a gallery card is just TMI.

I appreciate the security concerns, but surely there must be a way to sort this out. Or if not, I hope Esri and others are pressuring whoever made the upstream change to how PDFs are stored that resulted in the security vulnerability.

Here are several posts that illustrate use cases from the Esri Community in case that's helpful.

Solved: Can't get PDF to open full screen from Hub gallery - Esri Community

Solved: Unable to Open PDF in AGOL only Download- New as o... - Esri Community

Automatic Download on Data I added to ArcGIS Hub. ... - Esri Community

Method for Viewing Embedded PDFs? - Esri Community