Improving pop-up widget speed in ArcGIS Viewer for Flex 3.0

[VirginiaSeamster]

Hello!

I'm developing a web map using the ArcGIS Viewer for Flex 3.0 Application Builder. My question is: do you have any recommendations for improving the speed with which the pop-up window displays after a feature is selected from a tiled service?

I have several raster datasets that I want to display in the web map- and there are attributes that I'd like to display from these rasters using the pop-up widget. In order to get the attributes to show up in the pop-up configuration- I converted the rasters to polygons, dissolved on the attribute I wanted to display, and then published the mxd to a feature service within ArcCatalog (I have ArcGIS Server 10.0). I created tiles for the feature service and then brought the tiled service into the web map using the Flex Application Builder.

For several of these tiled layers- when I click on a polygon in the web map-it takes a long time for the pop-up window to load -in some cases more than a minute- and sometimes the pop-up window doesn't ever open, or the pop-up that opens is actually for a different layer that I'd looked at previously.

Is there something I can do to the polygons- say use "simplify polygons"- that would help? Or a setting that I should change for the feature service/tiled service- say the time out limit? Or should I look into using the image extension to publish the rasters- can you do pop-ups for rasters published using the extension?

Any thoughts are very much appreciated and I'm happy to provide further detail if that would be helpful.

Thank you!

Virginia

[AnthonyGiles]

Virginia,

If you use a raster catalogue for your imagery you can add extra fields in the catalogue to hold your attributes, such as image date etc... This attributes can then be used in your pop up. This seems to work fine for me.

Regards

Anthony

[VirginiaSeamster]

Thanks for the feedback Anthony.

Just to make sure I'm understanding correctly-is it true that I could take the following steps?

1) Set up a raster catalog in the file geodatabase where I've been storing all my feature classes
2) Move the rasters into the catalog
3) For each raster add the fields that I want to display in the pop-up windows
4) Publish each raster from ArcGIS Desktop as a map service
5) Bring the map services into the web map and configure pop-ups based on the added fields

Virginia

[AnthonyGiles]

Virginia,

The raster catalogue will act as a single layer in your mxd (this is what you will publish) and is essentially just be a pointer to your raster data sets. As it is only a single layer the attributes in the catalogue will be common to all layers. When you add your rasters to your catalogue ensure that you use a UNC path so that our server can access your data.

Regards

Anthony

[VirginiaSeamster]

Thank you for the clarification Anthony.

Two additional questions:
1) Are UNC path's required for the rasters when loading to the catalogue if ArcGIS Server is running on the same machine as the database containing the catalogue?
2) Are the fields added within ArcCatalog? Or in the mxd?

Virginia

[VirginiaSeamster]

And a third question:

Can you set up symbology for each of the raster layers in the raster catalogue? I've loaded the 4 rasters to a single catalogue and the rasters are displaying in gray scale.

Virginia

[VirginiaSeamster]

Hi Anthony:

After experimenting with the raster catalog a bit- it looks like you can configure a pop-up that applies to the whole raster and contains attributes that are relevant for the whole raster. I did not see a way of setting up symbology separately for the different raster layers.

I'm looking to have pop-ups that identify information about the individual pixels within the rasters- not for the whole raster. And I have a different symbology set up for each raster. More specifically - I have 4 rasters, each of which shows different habitat types(terrestrial, aquatic, riparian, etc) and I want the user to be able to identify the habitat type in a given pixel using a pop-up window. I also want to have the colors for the different habitat types show up in the map legend.

So unless there is a way of tying the attribute field that can be added to the raster catalog table to a specific field in one of the rasters in the catalog- I think I might need to try a different approach.

Any thoughts?

Again- thank you for the feedback.

Virginia

[AnthonyGiles]

Virginia,

You are correct that using a raster catalogue the attributes within that table will apply each raster dataset added, but the values can be different for each raster, i.e. image date  or something similar. If you want to give individual pixels attributes then you will need to use a raster dataset attribute table, see:

http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/index.html#//009t00000009000000

Regarding the UNC path as your server in on the same machine as your data you will probably be ok using a normal drive letter.

I'm not sure how the raster symbology will show in your legend.

Regards

Anthony

[VirginiaSeamster]

Hi Anthony:

Thank you for the clarifications.

My rasters already have attribute tables - my problem is: if I publish the mxd containing the rasters to a map service and then select the raster layers within the Viewer for Flex Application Builder and try to do pop-up configuration on them- I am not given the option to select fields from the attribute tables to display in the pop-up windows. I don't know if you can configure pop-ups using raster attributes if the rasters are published using Image Server- I haven't gotten Image Server set up.

This is why I converted to polygons - I was able to select fields from the attribute tables for the polygon layers for display in the pop-ups. But conversion to polygons makes the services display slowly- thus requiring tiling- and, even when the services are tiled, there is the big time delay on pop-up window display that I mentioned in my original post.

So my options seem to be to 1) somehow improve the speed with which the polygons display OR 2) figure out what has to be done for the fields of the attribute tables of the individual rasters to show up as selectable for display in the pop-up windows.

Any further comments or recommendations would be much appreciated.

Virginia

[AnthonyGiles · Accepted solution]

Virginia,

I am using a 2.5 version of Roberts identify tool (link below), if I set this up against a raster layer I can identify pixel values in that layer. I am still using 2.5 so I do not use the app builder to configure.

http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=39cf66d58c234279ba728c50461a1a89

there is also so more detail in this thread:

http://forums.arcgis.com/threads/44399-Raster-identify-(pixel-value)-with-viewer-for-flex

Regards

Anthony