Latest Contributions by JohnFannon

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 ... View more

Hi Is there an existing widget for Web App Builder that will allow the user to go to (zoom or pan) an XY location in a configured coordinate system? I have a requirement to implement this and the Geocode widget will find address, postcode etc, but not XY. If not, then how easy is it to create one and use this in an existing AGOL hosted Web App Builder application? All the deployment examples I've read seem to refer to a local deployment, not one hosted on AGOL. I'm fairly new to this, so I may well be missing something simple here. Cheers John ... View more

Hi I'm looking at developing a more flexible and robust tool for creating large mobile caches as we have seen lots of issues with the GP tools with large caches at v10. I'm looking at using the SDK and using a map document (mxd) as input (as per the GP tools), but have looked at the SDK and can't see a way sync using a map document. The MapDocumentConnection class seems to be what I need, but this is Abstract and therefore not creatable. So how do you use a map document (not a URL to server) to sync using the SDK. I'm thinking it must be possible as the GP tools surely use the SDK behind the scenes. Any ideas most welcome. John ... View more

Currently issues with ArcGIS Online need to be raised through the local Esri distributor. For example, the 'Report an Issue' link on the ArcGIS Online Health Dashboard page just links to a page containing contact info for the local distributor.  This support model does not work well with services delivered in the cloud and managed/supported by Esri Inc. For example, a recent issue with online feature services was raised with Esri UK on 7th Jan and is still not resolved on 14th Jan. The main reason is that Esri Inc did not get sight of the issue until a few days after it was raised. Obviously for a customer's enterprise solution to be impacted for over a week is not acceptable.  Where the issue is directly related to an AGOL service provided by Esri Inc, we should be able to raise issues directly via an AGOL support page. Without this mechanism, I also beleive that the Health Dashboard does not provide the real-time situation, because issues are held for days by the distributor before being raised with Esri Inc. ... View more

Hi I am trying to arrive at a methodology that will allow us to edit features (actually download and then delete) from a hosted feature service in ArcGIS Online using a scheduled python script. After some browsing the forums I see some solutions that use highly customised methods to call the REST api etc. However, what I can looking for is a method that uses arcpy and not lots of custom code. In ArcGIS 10.1, if I sign in to ArcGIS Online and add the feature service to an ArcMap document, then I can open a cursor (either arcpy.searchcursor or arcpy.da.searchcursor) on a layer in the feature service in the command line window and access the rows (features). For Example: featCur = arcpy.SearchCursor(r"myFeatureServiceLayerName") for feat in featCur:   print str(feat.getValue("OBJECTID")) This seems to be close to being the correct solution. However, if I save the layer in the mxd to a layer file and try to open a cursor from outside ArcMap (i.e. in ArcCatalog command line) by using the layer file as input, I get the following error: ERROR 999999: Error executing function. Authentication token required. This occurs whether or not I am signed in to ArcGIS Online. Has anyone managed to get a similar script working with an online feature service? I cannot be the first person to want to script the download/update of features from a hosted feature service. Any pointers most appreciated. Regards John ... View more