Option to maintain map extent when scrolling through a StoryMap

[Anneka_France]

What we would ideally like to be able to do: We are having an issue with the map extent re-setting between slides in a sidecar block. Sometimes we want to tell a story about spatial data, not about a single spatial location. So we want people to be able to zoom to their area of interest (e.g. their local neighbourhood) and then scroll through the StoryMap seamlessly, without having to manually zoom back in every time they scroll to a new slide or click on a map action.

A second-best option: We have tried setting out our story map as one long single slide and using map actions so that our readers can manually change the layers. This is not ideal, as we would prefer the layers to automatically change rather than having to rely on our readers clicking a button. This would be preferable, however, to requiring our readers to keep finding their area of interest. This seems to work sometimes, but at other times the map resets on the button click. Whether the extent resets seems random; the same button may or may not reset the extent. We cannot work out what determines whether the extent resets of not.

We have the following questions:

• What would you suggest as the best way to achieve a story map that allows our readers to scroll through multiple data layers, without requiring them to zoom to their preferred location of interest for each layer individually?
• Would it be possible for you to add in an option to keep the readers last extent when adding a new slide to a Sidecar in the future, please? We believe this used to be possible with the old story maps  and was / would be a very useful feature.
• Is the map action button supposed to reset the extent or not? Is the fact it is sometimes resetting a bug or are we doing something that determines this?
• Is there any way to specify whether the extent is reset or not when setting up a map action?

[OwenGeo]

Thanks for posting this idea @Anneka_France.

• What would you suggest as the best way to achieve a story map that allows our readers to scroll through multiple data layers, without requiring them to zoom to their preferred location of interest for each layer individually?

You could use a simple configurable app in the sidecar media panel. As long as the same app appears in consecutive slides, the extent won't change. The limitation here is that you don't have the ability to toggle layer visibility from the story builder between slides.

• Would it be possible for you to add in an option to keep the readers last extent when adding a new slide to a Sidecar in the future, please? We believe this used to be possible with the old story maps  and was / would be a very useful feature.

We've discussed something similar to this and would like to add this in a future release, but we don't have a specific timeline for it at this time.

• Is the map action button supposed to reset the extent or not? Is the fact it is sometimes resetting a bug or are we doing something that determines this?
• Is there any way to specify whether the extent is reset or not when setting up a map action?

When a map action configuration is saved, the extent shown in the map designer is saved with that action. If the extent of an action is different than the extent currently shown, clicking the action should move the map to the extent stored with that action. I'm not sure I have enough information to determine if what you're describing is expected or not, but if you could provide a sample story that shows this behavior (or share steps to create the situation) we can take a look to see if there is a bug or not.