Hi
I've been trying to configure a basic editing app for a big Esri customer using the Web AppBuilder that needs to be hosted on ArcGIS Online. This was sold to the customer by Esri as major benefit to their solution. I've configured this using the geocode widget and edit widget and initially was impressed by how straightforward it was.
However, after showing this to the customer and playing some more with the app, I've found the following:
- There is a bug which prevents the edit popup from appearing after using the Geocode widget. Once the geocode widget is used, the app continually displays the geocode search results popup, rather than the edit popup when attempting to create or edit existing features. This simply makes the app unusable for the customer, because the workflow is to search for a location and then add a feature! I've raised this with Esri UK support.
- The dates displayed in the edit popup are in US format and there is no way to configure this anyway. The app should have somewhere in configuration to set the localisation, this is basic functionality for an application with an international customer base.
- The is no 'Today' option on the date drop down in the attribute editor, instead it defaults to some ridiculous date or by editing the feature template I can get it to default to a specific date, but this isn't good enough. This should default to today's date, where nothing is set in the feature template and there should be a 'Today' button on the drop down. This is done well in other Esri apps, so why not here?
- The Query widget does not issue the correct where clause syntax when querying dates, so I cannot configure a query that works on a date field because it just returns query failed! Again, this is raised with Esri UK support.
- When the table widget is open, it doesn't resize the left pane, where the edit and legend are displayed. Therefore a user cannot use the edit toolbar whilst the table is displayed.
- A key requirement of any GIS application is to be able to search, by both address and coordinates. Why oh why is there no ability to search by XY? It is so simple to implement, but is missing from this and lots of other Esri apps. The first thing most of our customers ask is, 'can I search by XY?' and I have to then explain that it will involve customisation!
- The customers feature layer has a text field of 255 characters, this displays as a single line text box in the edit popup. This doesn't result in the best user experience and it should be relatively simple to resize the text box based on the field date type.
Basically, the Web AppBuilder is a good start, but I'm far from convinced that it is suitable for production use yet with all these issues and considering this really is a very basic app we are looking to configure. Yes - we can download the template and hack about with it and then host it ourselves, but then it's not OOB or COTS then is it!
John
