Enhancement to Search and Near Me Widgets
I recently deployed a web app for our Fire Marshal that depicts the different areas in Clark County, Washington and their regulations for fireworks use. The web app was deployed in our internal Portal/Enterprise system, not through ArcGIS Online. The required functionality consisted of providing a search tool that would allow users to input an address, zoom/pan to the location after the address was entered, and then see a popup that pointed to the location and provided information on the fireworks regulations for that location. The Search widget works great for this requirement but it is not configurable to show layer attributes as part of the popup that appears when a user enters an address. All that a user sees when they enter an address into the Search widget is a popup with the address:
I ended up using the Near Me widget (renamed to Search By Address in the screenshots below) to satisfy the functionality requirements. The Near Me widget can be configured to show attributes from layers that fall within a specified proximity of the address that the user inputs. While the required functionality is there, the widget’s search results window shows too much information, takes up too much screen space, and does not allow me to configure the widget to only show the information/text that I want it to show:
It would be great if both the Search and Near Me widgets could be enhanced to provide more functionality and configuration capabilities. For the Search widget, it would be nice to add a section in the widget configuration menu that allows me to specify layer attributes to show on the search results popup in addition to the address that already appears in that popup. This would allow my focused web apps to use the simple search and popup functionality that the Search widget offers while also showing one or more attributes from layers that the search result location intersects. This is my preferred enhancement because of the overall simplicity of the Search widget – it’s very user friendly, easy to configure, and it takes up very little screen space on web apps that are embedded on webpages or consumed by mobile devices.
For the Near Me widget, it would be nice to allow me to have more capability to configure the widget’s results window so that irrelevant text, buffers, distances, etc. can be removed. The widget provides a lot of good functionality but the results window is overly complicated, takes up too much screen space, and shows too much white space.
