Community

WebApp Builder 'app state' does not remember what Basemap was selected

1401
6
06-10-2019 06:18 PM
Status: Open
by Anonymous User
Not applicable

WebApp Builder's 'app state' popup allows users to reload their last extent and what operational layers were on.  

It would be great if it also could remember what Basemap was selected in the Basemap widget.

And lower priority but if it remembered the state of other widgets that would be neat, like Filter. And saved numerous states to cache or to file like the brilliant SaveSession.

6 Comments
RyanKelso
by
‎08-23-2019 12:29 PM

I came here to create an idea for this exact enhancement but unsurprisingly Kevin "Mr. Everywhere" MacLeod beat me to it!    It's come up a number of times with our users, I think people intuitively expect that the app state would also include their favorite basemap.  I hope the web appbuilder team eventually sees this.

by Anonymous User
‎08-24-2019 08:40 AM

Thanks Ryan!

One advantage of supporting this natively in the WebApp Builder framework is it would more readily let custom widgets like Save Session or the Share widget also remember what Basemap is on.  And to this, I would add that perhaps App State could track what layers from REST services have been added via Add Data or from other sources.  This would therefore enable Save Session to more readily remember basemaps and external layers that were added.

https://community.esri.com/docs/DOC-13447-savesession-that-supports-heavy-map-layers-and-imagery-lay... 

My theory is that subsets of users may want a few extra operational layers to always be loaded on top of a viewer, which no one else would be interested in. Let's say it's traffic engineers, and they always want Traffic Lights loaded. And perhaps one else would want these layers, at least by default.  And let's suppose we have nearly all our layers on Open Data (we do). Thus, it would enable users to use Open Data to browse layers and add in a few extra they want, then... to add them, and WebApp Builder would always remember they were added.  (via App State and/or loading in from SaveSession)

An addendum to this is making the Add Data have more than one Curated Category; enabling it to function as a 'mini-Open Data' or a preview gallery for Open Data so to speak. add Open Data to Add Data Widget and allow multiple Curated Categories All these ideas are connected...  Allowing sublayers to load as a dynamic map service (not a featureLayer) is also important to effectively implementing this last idea. https://community.esri.com/ideas/9987-group-layers-for-arcgis-online#comment-74360  (also important for being able to group them in different lists as I noted here)

With these ideas combined, users can customize their viewer with the basemap and operational layers they want, and it will stay that way, and hopefully they can save it with Save Session.  And the operational layers will be dynamic map services sublayers (e.g. mapserver/0) until they support featurelayer tiling in Server Enterprise https://community.esri.com/message/873210-re-feature-service-tiling?commentID=873210#comment-873210 

by Anonymous User
‎08-24-2019 08:43 AM

I can see this reducing the need to deploy many viewers, with the same set of basic layers and a few additional specialized layers, and getting in the pattern of creating viewer after viewer for different audiences. It seems worth adding to WAB at least to try as a concept, to see if it works for customers that serve up viewers to multiple different audiences and customer groups.

SusanPollard
by
‎03-17-2022 06:20 PM

Saving the state including basemaps , added data, layer order, transparency, labelling and any other customisations made during a session should be what a "saved state" does. It is extremely frustrating to have to reset everything after a map refresh. Can this be added to the saved state so the session  is exactly as a user left it. An out of box widget to do this with capability to be shared is high on the wish list. 

EmanuelBurman
by
‎02-21-2023 01:26 AM

It would be so intuitiv if "add data" layers was saved in the map state. We get so many users asking for this and they are all comfused it can not be solved by us administratators. Just hope you fix this funktionality.