Enhanced Search Widget 2.5 - Having trouble searching a layer with a join to excel

[EthanKranau]

Hello all, I just spent 2 hours looking through almost every forum on this site that has to do with the Enhanced Search Widget, which is awesome by the way. Robert S is the bomb.

Anyway, the widget works great until I try to search a field that is located in an Excel spreadsheet. I will explain. I am putting together a gis website and am wanting a parcel search function. So I have the Parcels as a searchable layer in the xml file and I setup 2 expressions. One for the Parcel ID and one for the Owner. When searching by PID it works flawlessly, but searching by a name causes the search widget to think for a while and the spinning icon spins for several minutes then eventually shows the error in the attached image:

The data is being displayed just fine when doing a PID search, even the fields from the Excel Spreadsheet. However, when running a query on the PartyName field which is in the spreadhseet, I get the error.

So my theory is that the '$' in the table name is what is causing the issue.

My code is below.

<expressions>  <expression alias="Parcel ID" textsearchlabel="Search by Parcel ID  [ Example: 010008909 or 0100%]:">PARCELS.PID like '[value]'</expression>  <expression alias="Owner Search" textsearchlabel="Search by Property Owner [Example: Smith John (Last name first)]:">upper(Sheet1$OrionNEW.PartyName) like upper('%[value]%')</expression> </expressions> <fields all="false">  <field name="PARCELS.PID" alias="Parcel Id" />  <field name="Sheet1$OrionNEW.PartyName" alias="Property Owner"/>  <field name="Sheet1$OrionNEW.PartyAddress" alias="Property Address"/>  <field name="Sheet1$OrionNEW.LegalDescription" alias="Legal Desc"/>  <field name="PARCELS.acres" alias="Acres"/> </fields>

P.S. I pray to the GIS gods that Robert S. sees this post. Thanks for your time everyone.

[RobertScheitlin__GISP]

Simeon,

   Joining to an excel Speadsheet is ok in ArcMap but definetly not reocmended in a Web Application like Flex Viewer. My recomendation is to take the excell data and make an actual table out of it in a geodatabase and then do the join to it and publish.

[EthanKranau]

Robert,

Thanks for responding so quickly! You are crazy involved in this forum community. Thank you so much!

I will try to find a different solution for joining our data. We were just looking for the easiest way to update the parcel data from our assessor server. But we will find another way.

Do you have an idea of what was actually causing the error? Or is it just not fully supported?

[RobertScheitlin__GISP · Accepted solution]

Simeon,

   I can not say exactly. But I have seen nothing but issues like this with people that attempt to use excel joins.

Don't forget to click the Mark as answer check and to click the top arrow (promote) as shown below:

[EthanKranau]

I see. Maybe we will try a file geodatabase. Just trying to find a way to make changes to a table while the service is running.

Maybe that isn't possible. I don't know. Thanks for your help!

[RobertScheitlin__GISP]

Simeon,

   I have a couple of services that run from FGDBs and I update them every night without taking the service down.

[EthanKranau]

Do you do that automatically?

[RobertScheitlin__GISP]

Simeon,

   Yes, but likely a much differnt workflow than what you are needing. I have an SDE in state plane coordinates and I created a child distributed geodatabase in webMercator that is replicated from the parent SDE and then I run a pyton script to sync the DBs every night.