Story Maps Shortlist: Sort order of locations/pictures

[Thomas_Van_Bruggen]

- Can I use an attribute field to determined the sort (presentation) order of the points/pictures on each tab within a shortlist story map?  Right now it is using the ObjectID and that is not the order I want/need to have them sorted.  I want this to be automated when I re-upload the original data to update the feature service in AGOL and just have the storymap automatically update the presentation order.

[RupertEssinger · Accepted solution]

When you create a Shortlist from existing point data or data in a spreadsheet (see here for info about that) the order in which the tabs appear in your Shortlist and the order in which the places inside each tab appear in your Shortlist is based on their record order in your point layer. 

So the first record in your data defines the first tab and the first place in that tab. If you are importing the data in that layer into a Shortlist, you can change the tab order and place order in the Shortlist Builder. But if you are using the 'as-is' option to drive your Shortlist directly from that data, you can't reorder the tabs or places in the Builder, because your dataset defines your Shortlist. 

If you want the places in a tab to have a different order than is inherent in the record order, you can include an optional integer field called PLACENUMSL to specify the order of the places inside each tab. This is useful because it saves you having to manually change the order of the records just to change place order. It also lets you automate the creation of Shortlist data more easily. PLACENUMSL is respected whether you are importing the data into the Shortlist or using the 'as-is' option, but it is especially handy for the 'as-is' option to let you easily change place inside tabs if, like me, you change your mind a lot geographically. The value of PLACENUMSL has no effect on the order of the tabs in your Shortlist: Tab order is determined solely by record order. 

If you use the option in your Shortlist to display places with numbers, the number for each place will be its value of PLACENUMSL (unless you imported the data and then rearrange the places manually in the Shortlist Builder). 

For example, here's a web map containing a CSV file that defines a Shortlist. The TAB_NAME field defines the tab names in the Shortlist and the order of the TAB_NAME values defines the order I want the tabs to be in, Within each tab, there are 6 places, and I've used the PLACENUMSL field to specify the order in which I want those places to be listed in each tab, which is the reverse order to the record order the places are in. For example I used the PLACENUMSL values to make the first record in the layer, the Gaslamp Quarter, be place number 6 in the Shortlist instead of being place number 1 as it would be without the PLACENUMSL field being present. If you open my web map and save a copy of it in your account, you can share it using the Story Map Shortlist to see the result. After choosing Share > Create a Web App > Story Maps > Story Map Shortlist, you'll be prompted to say how you want to use the point data it detects in the map. Choose either 'import' or 'as-is'.

Note: there are issues with this workflow with ArcGIS Enterprise feature services with tab order sometimes changing, so we don't recommend AGS feature services for this. ArcGIS Online feature services and CSV files (either uploaded directly into web maps like in the example I posted above or published as feature services) are OK.

For legacy purposes, Shortlist also supports a field called NUMBER for the same purpose as PLACENUMSL. However some data types won't allow a field called NUMBER to be added, so for new Shortlists you should use PLACENUMSL instead of NUMBER. If a layer contains both fields, then PLACENUMSL is respected.

Rupert