Latest Contributions by GarethBaker1

We really like using the Story Map Series template for situations where we've got a lot of data layers to show but want to break them up into manageable groups to make it easier for a user to understand.  So we put different groups of layers in a web map for each tab e.g. environmental, partnerships, transport etc and because they can be synched then we get a nice experience for browsing through the data - certainly preferable to scrolling through a long list of layers in a table of contents. What would make this even better would be if there was some way to pass across an extent that we'd like the first map tab to zoom to in the same way that you can for a Web App Builder app (https://doc.arcgis.com/en/web-appbuilder/manage-apps/app-url-parameters.htm), either by passing coordinates of an extent or specifying a map feature to zoom to. I know that ESRI have just released the ability to use main stage actions within the Series template but this would require us populating a list of every single feature in our map layer that we might want to zoom to (400 records in this case) and still relies on the user clicking on the correct one.  If it could be passed to the app via the URL instead (obviously relies on the entry specified being a map tab) then we could very easily link to it from our content management system where there is a page of details per map feature. I guess this might be achievable if we download and customise the template but would be great if it was done out of the box. ... View more

We really like using the Story Map Series template for situations where we've got a lot of data layers to show but want to break them up into manageable groups to make it easier for a user to understand.  So we put different groups of layers in a web map for each tab e.g. environmental, partnerships, transport etc and because they can be synched then we get a nice experience for browsing through the data - certainly preferable to scrolling through a long list of layers in a table of contents. What would make this even better would be if there was some way to pass across an extent that we'd like the first map tab to zoom to in the same way that you can for a Web App Builder app (https://doc.arcgis.com/en/web-appbuilder/manage-apps/app-url-parameters.htm), either by passing coordinates of an extent or specifying a map feature to zoom to. I know that ESRI have just released the ability to use main stage actions within the Series template but this would require us populating a list of every single feature in our map layer that we might want to zoom to (400 records in this case) and still relies on the user clicking on the correct one.  If it could be passed to the app via the URL instead (obviously relies on the entry specified being a map tab) then we could very easily link to it from our content management system where there is a page of details per map feature. I guess this might be achievable if we download and customise the template but would be great if it was done out of the box. ... View more

I'm using the Export Tile Cache tool in ArcToolbox to create a TPK file which is then sideloaded into Collector iOS using the methodology described here: http://doc.arcgis.com/en/collector/ios/collect-data/offline-use.htm All this is working fine but I noticed that when using the Manage functionality within Collector to look at the TPKs that it shows a default thumbnail for each item. It would be quite useful if each TPK could have a custom thumbnail image to help users distinguish between the different offline basemaps.  If I poke around in the TPK file on a PC then I can see that there is potentially provision within the esriinfo\iteminfo.xml file for a thumbnail e.g. <thumbnail>thumbnail/thumbnail.png</thumbnail> but there doesn't seem to be any kind of workflow that I can find to actually set this to a custom image. It's really not a major problem but thought I'd post just in case anyone else had cracked this particular nut. Thanks Gareth ... View more

Add the ability as Portal administrators for restrict the types of content that users can create. In effect this would be splitting the Content > Create, edit and delete privilege in the roles to different types of content such as web maps, layers, apps (which might be further split into Story Maps, templates, web app builder etc). The reasoning behind this is that we only want users to be able to use properly managed, authoritative apps built by the GIS team to meet a specific business requirement. Similarly we'd also prefer them to only use authoritative data layers that we've uploaded to avoid multiple copies of datasets popping up across the Portal. We've been running our Portal for about six months with a small number of core apps for users to consume and we've restricted user roles to not allow any content creation.  We're getting close to rolling out more functionality starting with the ability for users to add corporate layers into the map viewer and then save and share their own web maps.  There doesn't currently appear to be a way of doing this without opening up the ability to also create apps and upload their own data.  There may well be future use cases where we're happy for them to do this but for now it's almost as if Portal offers too much advanced functionality for our users - we have to support and document all of this, how do you explain that there is this option to create different types of app but we'd actually prefer it if you don't use it?! The best we can probably come up with for now is to restrict sharing of content only to certain groups (rather than organisation wide) and then do some kind of regular trawl through users' content directories to remove any items which are applications possibly using the Python API. ... View more

Add the ability as Portal administrators for restrict the types of content that users can create. In effect this would be splitting the Content > Create, edit and delete privilege in the roles to different types of content such as web maps, layers, apps (which might be further split into Story Maps, templates, web app builder etc). The reasoning behind this is that we only want users to be able to use properly managed, authoritative apps built by the GIS team to meet a specific business requirement. Similarly we'd also prefer them to only use authoritative data layers that we've uploaded to avoid multiple copies of datasets popping up across the Portal. We've been running our Portal for about six months with a small number of core apps for users to consume and we've restricted user roles to not allow any content creation.  We're getting close to rolling out more functionality starting with the ability for users to add corporate layers into the map viewer and then save and share their own web maps.  There doesn't currently appear to be a way of doing this without opening up the ability to also create apps and upload their own data.  There may well be future use cases where we're happy for them to do this but for now it's almost as if Portal offers too much advanced functionality for our users - we have to support and document all of this, how do you explain that there is this option to create different types of app but we'd actually prefer it if you don't use it?! The best we can probably come up with for now is to restrict sharing of content only to certain groups (rather than organisation wide) and then do some kind of regular trawl through users' content directories to remove any items which are applications possibly using the Python API. ... View more

Two relatively simple things which I believe would significantly increase the usability of this template: Be able to specify which layers from my web map are included in the summary panel. At the moment it just assumes that you want to be able to show results for every layer in the map, whereas some of them such as a boundary layer are really only there as a visual reference so I'd like them to be drawn at all times. Allow the option for the buffer distance to be consistent across all layers. At the moment if a user adjusts the search distance for the first layer, it resets back to the default once they move on to the next layer. They have to keep resetting the distance for each new layer that they look at. I'd like the user to be able to set it once and then be automatically applied to all layers. ... View more

I'd like to be able to include the current map scale in the labels for a feature in Portal 10.5.1. The documentation on this page suggests that only the feature to be labelled is available as a global variable in Arcade expression https://developers.arcgis.com/arcade/guide/profiles/#labelling However within the playground section on the same site the current map scale is available under the labelling profile If I try to use the map scale global in an Arcade label expression on a layer in a Portal 10.5.1 web map I get an error about the view identifier not being found. I'm guessing that the reason it works in the playground is that the page is built with the JS API and that has a slightly different implementation of Arcade than Portal 10.5.1 perhaps? My question is will the map scale global be available in later versions of Portal? ... View more