The Best Way To Handle Groups of Data?
I made a map. Do you want to see it?
It's kind of pretty in a way, like a Jackson Pollock painting, and it's almost as informative. There's just too much stuff here. If only, I could group my data into logical categories that my end-users could easily turn on and off as they wanted. But that's just a dream...or is it? I don't actually know. I'm writing this as I go, but the February 2025 ArcGIS Online update should have made this dream come true. Let's find out together.
The first thing I will do is turn off the visibility for all the layers in my map, except Single People And Cheese. Why Single People And Cheese? Because someone at ESRI made a data layer about Single People And Cheese and how else can I tell you that exists? It's one of many delights you can find on this testing server, I will be getting my data from. 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.
Hey, before we go any farther, let's take a moment to test this out.
In Preview Mode, I click on the lines and triangle and Turn On All Layers...
Oh, no. Pollock is back. Sorry folks, this isn't going to work. I really thought it would. I wouldn't have put so many layers into the map if I didn't think it would work.
Hey Dev Team, restrict the on/off all layers function to the Customized Layers within a Map Layers Widget and we would have something very great here.
Update Live From DevSummit: I told @Jianxia that this made me cry and she said this is not the intended behavior, it is now a priority fix that will be taken care of in the next update, or maybe even sooner...
