First Thoughts On The June 2025 ArcGIS Online Update
It will be is was* ArcGIS Online Update Day again, so it's time for the fourth addition of our First Thoughts series. Before we talk about what the official development team has been up to, I'd like to shout out the work of the unofficial development team: us. We have been super busy coming out with a lot of new high impact Widgets over the past couple months. I have been struggling to keep up with the changes in the List of Custom Widgets. Some of the things added by these Widgets include: freehand drawings and editing drawing symbology, changing map symbology at runtime and saving the state of an application. Features that don't now have OOTB support in Experience Builder. But make sure to keep checking that list often, there's still many ways the Community is ahead of ESRI. Other headline grabbing features in the June '25 Update include: advanced formatting options, Arcade support, and batch editing. All in all, this is the most impactful update in at least a year.
Here are the rules for this series:
- I read the official What's New in Experience Builder Blog post.
- I maybe try a few things for a few minutes. (That's a big maybe today. ESRI is having a bad day.)
- I attempt to translate the What's New page from developer to English.
- If I don't think something is going to be very important to many people, I leave it out of my notes.
- I might make some guesses how the new stuff can be used.
- You don't get mad at me if you can't actually do those things.
Accessibility
Accessibility features have been added to a ton of Widgets and Template. If you are working for a government entity, you probably have legal accessibility targets to hit, so make sure you are using whatever tools are available. If you aren't working for a government entity, try to hit those accessibility targets anyway.
Actions
- Open View will open a View in a Section Widget. (Is this new? Didn't we already have this?)
- Toggle Widget lets you open and close a Widget in a Widget Controller. This DIY Widget Controller build just got better.
- Add Marker lets you point a point on a map.
- With the Add/View in Table Actions, you can decide to open in a new sheet or not.
- Export Data as shapefiles, geodatabases or KML.
Advanced Formatting
This might invalidate like half the posts on this Blog. Use your data to change text, image sources, links, backgrounds, borders and more. Do it no-code or write some Arcade for more complicated stuff.
Data
- Datasource IDs are no longer a mystery. (Unhiding the Widget IDs would also be nice.)
- Search for data outside your organization, if your Admin says it's ok.
- Add data with Arcade.
- New field types:
- Big Integer - Don't you hate it when you can't count past 4,294,967,296? Now, you can count to 9,007,199,254,740,991.
- Date Only - For timeless days.
- Time Only - For dayless times.
Embedding
There is a new policy involving the Embed Widget, which I believe is more strict than it used to be and (if it is more strict) will break some of your apps. Here's the quote, then we'll talk about what it means and why they are doing this.
There are new rules for sharing authentication. ArcGIS uses token-based authentication for all access requests. When you embed an Experience Builder app in another ArcGIS app with the arcgis-auth-origin URL parameter, the Experience Builder app requests an access token from the parent app. The parent app decides whether to reply to the token. When you embed another app in an Experience Builder app with the Embed widget, the parent Experience Builder app only replies to the token request if the child app is under the*.arcgis.com domain or the same domain as the parent Experience Builder app.
The Embed Widget works using something called an iframe, that allow a little bit of one website to show on another website. In ye olden days of the Internet, iframes were very common. They are less common now for two reasons: branding and security. Many large websites have code that will reject connections from iframes. If you try to embed google.com, you will see a google.com refused to connect warning because Google doesn't want you to pretend you are Google. But the security problems are really the main reason for the downfall of iframes. Depending on the security settings of the iframe, the browser may have no way to tell where your website ends and the other website begins. So if you aren't careful, if the website you are embedding has a security issue, your website has a security issue, too.
In order to access secured features, the embedded and parent site need to do a super secret handshake. Experience Builder won't take part in this handshake unless its with arcgis.com. If you are on Developer Edition, both apps can be on yourcompany.com.
General Settings
Remember this from WebAppBuilder?
It's in Experience Builder now. Restore your app state. Restore your heart.
Because of the major ArcGIS Online outage today, I have been dealing with complaints all day about login prompts and inaccessible content warnings. It's getting near the end of the day and I'm only this far through the What's New page. A few weeks from now, when the new Developer Edition comes out, I will be able to turn these login prompts off forever and then I can die happy.
Languages
Do you need to translate to Norwegian? NO. That's what it's called now.
Pending List
The Pending List has been redesigned to clarify what, if any, screen sizes a Widget is used in.
Templates
Set sail on the new Templates called Harbor and Beacon. The Capabilities Button will help you decide which Template you should use.
New Widgets
I don't think I will ever use any of these new Widgets, but they sound useful to the people that will need them.
Display Order - For controlling mosaic datasets.
Document Explorer - Find ACC or BIM 360 files and folders then view them with 👇.
Document Viewer - See those ACC or BIM 360 documents.
Link Explorer - Find ACC or BIM 360 files linked to your map then view them with 👆.
Widget Updates
Add Data - Look, I said I would ignore pointless stuff, but this is just so pointless that it deserves recognition: there's a button to copy the sample URLs. Actually useful updates: symbology of imported layer will be respected and an option to limit the types of data imported.
Analysis - Support for geoprocessing of security enabled layers.
Business Analyst - New ESRI Tabular Reports template. If your American, your data can automatically update once a year. Rest of the world... look, it's been kind of rough around here lately... can you just let us have something?
Chart - Label your pie. Personally, I will label every slice 'mine'.
Directions - End users can save their routes. Builders can add a lot of barriers and define start and end points.
Draw - Freehand drawings and editing the symbology after drawing means ESRI has caught up to @RobertScheitlin__GISP three and a half years ago. Edit multiple graphics at once. @Brian_McLeer, they beat us on that one, but we still maintain the overall lead.
Edit - It was promised in each of the last two updates, but this time it actually happened: batch editing. Enjoy. Change the attributes, size, location and rotation of multiple features at once. Cherish it.
Other stuff: Line segment length labels for 3D scenes. Reorder the layers. If you add data using Arcade, the editor can edit it. Faster layer loading.
Elevation Profile - You can choose whether or not to clear the results when the Widget closes or hides.
Feature Report - Make a report from any feature layer. Survey123 is no longer required.
Filter - Change the order of predefined values.
Floor Filter - Your floor aware stuff just got way more floor aware. I don't really do Indoor stuff, but from the description, it sounds like floor filters actually work the way you would expect them to now. Also, floor aware Arcade editing support.
Flow Row - Add the Space Around and Space Between attributes to complete the Flexbox CSS options. Space Around is my favorite flavor of Flexbox.
Image - Expand your images. Pan around. Zoom and Enhance. Click arrows or swipe through multiple images. Make Tinder for geographic features?
Legend - Hide layers from your legend, including runtime layers.
List - Comma separator for the count of long lists. (Europe is really getting shafted on this update.) Checkmark if you're using a sort.
Map - Add a marker or lots of markers to the Map using URL Parameters. By default, 3D scenes render in lower quality on iPhone, so overpriced, underperforming phones don't explode.
Map Layers - Change the symbology of layers added at runtime. This is making fancy Widgets to add/remove data at runtime look even cooler. According to a promise made by @Jianxia at DevSummit, the show/hide all layers button should respect the Map Layers customization. According to testing, it does not. I will bring this up on every update until it does.
Measurement - A few updates ago, the Measurement Widget had snapping turned on by default. Since then many users have reported serious performance issues with it. And maybe, you just don't want snapping. Now, snapping can be turned off by the Builder. Or you could use a Draw/Measurement Widget where snapping must be deliberately enabled by the user.
Near Me - A whole lot of map surround options have been added to PDF reports. You can choose whether or not to clear the results when the Widget closes or hides. Hope this doesn't break all the fun hacks that depend on a hidden Near Me Widget.
Oriented Imagery Viewer - Make your own version of Google StreetView with Directional Navigation. Or define some other order for Sequential Navigation. Support for video. Use triangulation to the distance, area and location of stuff. These are things that make you say we really are living in the future.
Print - Pick what WKID to use for printing.
Query - Not in the What's New document, but my email says the broken Query Widget from the last update is unbroken and some quick testing confirms it.
Search - Search results that match what's been searched appear first. (Why wasn't it always like this? What was it doing before?)
Select - Reorder the layers in the Select Widget. It took a weird, unintuitive click sequence, but it can be done. Also, not in the What's New page, but if you place a Select Widget in a Widget Controller and close it with a select tool enabled, it will disable the select tool.
Share - Write the text that will appear in the email when a user shares by email.
Table - Support for showing and editing related records. Hovering over something in a Table will highlight the feature on the map in yellow. Option to automatically add runtime generated layers as tables. Decide what order you would like the tables to be in. Text display options, most importantly, text wrapping. Option to hide the Show/Hide Columns option.
That's all the notes for this update. The expect the next update to include those last set of edit tools missing from WebAppBuilder, just a bit too late for Enterprise 12.
* I got an early jump on writing this post this time around, but with all the disruptions caused by the ArcGIS Online outage (ESRI broke Nearmap real bad.) and the amount of stuff in this update. I couldn't get this all written up on update day. Sorry, I tried.
