Native Support For Thematic Layer Groups in Experience Builder, Seriously This Time
Don't think too much about the publish date. It's possible to make thematic layer groups in Experience Builder now without a Custom Widget. (Now meaning after the February 2026 ArcGIS Online update, Developer Edition 1.20, or Enterprise 12.1.) If your thinking I've written this post before, it's because I have, but seriously it actually works this time. You can read the linked article if you want. There really isn't any new information in this post except that it actually does what that build was meant to do now. Here's the critical info from that post:
I've grabbed basically every layer on that server that falls into these categories: Demographics, Natural Disasters, Animals and Cryptids, and I will try to make Experience Builder recognize these categories.
In Experience Builder, I am starting with the Pocket Template and I've added my webmap to the Map Widget. This Template has a big Placeholder Widget on the right side of the screen where I've added an Accordion Widget. If I was using a smaller number of categories, I would probably use a Section or Grid Widget instead, but somewhere around three or four an Accordion starts to make more sense.
And into the Accordion, I'll add a Map Layers Widget. I'll rename this Widget to Demographics. Then, I'll Customize Layers. I'll use the handy new layer toggle to turn off all the layers at once. Then, I'll turn back on just the demographic related data. For the other options in this Widget the most important thing is: Enable Layer Batch Options.
Let's pick up where we left off last year and finish this build. I'll click Duplicate on my Demographics Map Layers Widget, rename it to Disasters and change the layer customization so that I remove all the demographic data and add all the disaster data to the list of layers.
I'll do this again for Animals and Cryptids. As we all know, Cryptids are very real animals that The Man doesn't want us knowing about, so these categories overlap with all Cryptids being Animals, but not all Animals being Cryptids. I'll open up Preview Mode and test this out and...
Sorry, for the cliffhanger, ESRI Community is having a bad day and deleted the rest of this post that I will re-write now...
It works as intended. Why is there no trust on the first day of April? I can even see The Man's definition of animals in four clicks.
I also wanted to include an All Layers Map Layers Widget and here I encountered a small problem. When I attempted to Duplicate one of my other Map Layer Widgets and turn off the Customize Layers switch, the Batch Layer options did not work at all. But it worked fine when I tried again using a fresh Map Layers Widget.
Look, the UI on this isn't great. It's not something I would be satisfied putting out on a publicly facing application. But it is adequate enough for an internal application. At DevSummit, I discussed the interface of the Bookmarks Widget and how it could make a much better thematic layer switcher, if they allowed for bookmarks that don't change the map extent. Maybe look forward to that in a future update. But for now, this is the best native way to handle thematic layer groups in Experience Builder.
