Latest Contributions by JohnDye2

Currently, if you want to convert your Pro licenses from Named User to Concurrent Use licensing, you have to make that conversion at My Esri and then license Pro in ArcGIS License Manager, which under the hood is just Flexera's terrible FlexNet Publisher. There are 2 big issues with this: I don't want to run a server just for License Manager/FlexNet.  Yes. I could technically install License Manager on a Portal or Server machine and not have to run an extra server. FlexNet doesn't really work very well. It's slow. Cumbersome. Riddled with bugs and Esri can't fix it because its not their software. Portal for ArcGIS (Portal) and ArcGIS Online (AGOL), meanwhile can license ArcGIS Pro under the Named User Licensing model. Meaning, I can assign a Pro license to Jane Doe in Portal/AGOL and whenever Jane initializes Pro, if she is assigned a Pro license then everything works as expected. What I can't do in Portal/AGOL is authorize a user for access to a concurrent license of ArcGIS Professional because Portal does not support concurrent use licensing. Instead, I'm required to "assign" a Pro license to Jane, meaning that Pro license is essentially reserved for Jane and that Jane only. So if I have 10 licenses of ArcGIS Pro in my organization and 20 potential users, I have to run a License Server in order to support a concurrent use licensing model. I'd like to see Portal/AGOL support the Concurrent Use licensing. Under this scenario, an Administrator could either "assign" or "authorize" a license for a given user. If an Administrator "authorized" a Pro license for Jane Doe, then when Jane initializes Pro, it would query Portal/AGOL for her "authorizations" and see that she us "authorized" access to a Pro license. Pro would then request a Pro license from Portal and Portal would either grant one or deny the request based on current availability in its Pro licensing pool. Conversely, if the Administrator wanted Jane to always have access to ArcGIS Pro and never run into issues around license exhaustion, then the Administrator could "assign" a Pro license to her, which would essentially reserve one of the Pro licenses for Jane so that she never ran into a situation where there were no licenses available. It seems like this could work pretty seamlessly with the new User Types setup in AGOL. Further, if this could some how be integrated into ArcMap/Catalog/Globe/Scene as well and allow this workflow for all extensions, it would allow virtually all organizations that use Concurrent Use Licensing to get rid of License Manager and do all of their licensing in Portal/AGOL. ... View more

We have an app that we built with Web App Builder along with some custom LayerList and Swipe widgets. One of the requirements we got this morning is that instead of showing a popup with a Hyperlinked URL when a user clicks on a feature in the web map, the customer just wants to skip the popup behavior altogether and click on features to open the URL. I found a GeoNet Post by jai siva which gives me some good starting code:      var map;            require(["esri/map",                   "esri/layers/FeatureLayer",                   "esri/InfoTemplate",                   "dojo/on",                   "dojo/domReady!"],      function(Map,FeatureLayer,InfoTemplate,on) {             map = new Map("map", {             basemap: "topo",  //For full list of pre-defined basemaps, navigate to http://arcg.is/1JVo6Wd             center: [0, 0] // longitude, latitude                   });        var featureLayer = new FeatureLayer("http://sampleserver1.arcgisonline.com/ArcGIS/rest/services/Demographics/ESRI_Census_USA/MapServer/3");     map.addLayer(featureLayer);        //Code for the specific URL to open in a new window     featureLayer.on('click',function(e){        var specific = e.graphic.attributes['SpecificAttribute']        window.open("http://YourUrl.com/"+specific);     });         });   However, since this is going to be in a custom Web App Builder App, I'm having trouble finding the best place to drop the code. I've tried at init.js, simpleLoader.js and jimu.js/MapManager.js but haven't had any luck. Any ideas on the best place and/or way to accomplish this? ... View more

ArcGIS Online and Portal's built-in symbols are pretty basic and its not a reasonable for an organization to expect Esri to be able to meet their unique symbology needs down to the letter. But Esri could empower organizations to do this by supporting the use of custom icon fonts in Portal's symbology selector. Icon fonts are easy to put together using the help of a solution like Icon Font & SVG Icon Sets ❍ IcoMoon that allows you to import SVGs, load them into an Icon Font, including any custom colors if you like, then push those out to TTF, WOFF, WOFF2 and SVG Fonts. It would be a great improvement to be able to take these fonts and either install them on the Portal machine or host them elsewhere and configure then Portal to make these fonts available in Portal's built in symbology selector as custom symbology collections for use in Webmaps. If your custom symbology is comprised of PNGs, this is actually already possible. But, come on...PNGs? Icon fonts are: Flexible - The web is optimized for displaying text. With icon fonts, changing the color of your icons or applying other CSS effects is pretty simple, meaning Esri could do some pretty awesome stuff with icon fonts like changing colors, stacking different glyphs and even CSS animations that would work anywhere. Animations would be particularly cool because the only way to do that currently is with animated GIFs and that does not work everywhere at all. Scalable - Using icon fonts, changing the size of an icon is as simple as changing the font-size. All of the symbols could scale together in the font. If you need to change the size of specific symbols, CSS can handle that as well. Vector - Icon fonts are 100% vector. So they scale perfectly and appear crisp on any device at any resolution. Fast - They're fast! If you've ever looked at the network requests it takes to load a web map with a few layers symbolized by unique values, then you'll notice there's a ridiculous amount of requests to retrieve each unique symbol. That's dumb. Esri knows better than that. By having icons hosted in an icon font, you can load all of the icons you need in a single request. Even if you're using icons from multiple icon fonts, it's maybe 2 or 3 requests - one for each icon font needed. That's much better than say 40 requests to load each individual symbol! And icon fonts are meant for the web. They're small. We're talking kilobytes - so they load very fast which is great for mobile devices with constrained bandwidth. PNGs by contrast much larger on a per-symbol basis and if you're going with animated GIFs - man those can get out of hand really quickly. Accessible - When done right, icon fonts are completely accessible and compatible with screen readers. For those with disabilities that use font-switching browser extensions, all you need to do is add !important to the icon font-family and it won't switch. So text-based fonts that should be switched won't be declared as !important and those font-switchers will swap them out as the user expects. But icon fonts used in the map are declared as !important and thus won't be switched out. ... View more

ArcGIS Online and Portal's built-in symbols are pretty basic and its not a reasonable for an organization to expect Esri to be able to meet their unique symbology needs down to the letter. But Esri could empower organizations to do this by supporting the use of custom icon fonts in Portal's symbology selector. Icon fonts are easy to put together using the help of a solution like Icon Font & SVG Icon Sets ❍ IcoMoon that allows you to import SVGs, load them into an Icon Font, including any custom colors if you like, then push those out to TTF, WOFF, WOFF2 and SVG Fonts. It would be a great improvement to be able to take these fonts and either install them on the Portal machine or host them elsewhere and configure then Portal to make these fonts available in Portal's built in symbology selector as custom symbology collections for use in Webmaps. If your custom symbology is comprised of PNGs, this is actually already possible. But, come on...PNGs? Icon fonts are: Flexible - The web is optimized for displaying text. With icon fonts, changing the color of your icons or applying other CSS effects is pretty simple, meaning Esri could do some pretty awesome stuff with icon fonts like changing colors, stacking different glyphs and even CSS animations that would work anywhere. Animations would be particularly cool because the only way to do that currently is with animated GIFs and that does not work everywhere at all. Scalable - Using icon fonts, changing the size of an icon is as simple as changing the font-size. All of the symbols could scale together in the font. If you need to change the size of specific symbols, CSS can handle that as well. Vector - Icon fonts are 100% vector. So they scale perfectly and appear crisp on any device at any resolution. Fast - They're fast! If you've ever looked at the network requests it takes to load a web map with a few layers symbolized by unique values, then you'll notice there's a ridiculous amount of requests to retrieve each unique symbol. That's dumb. Esri knows better than that. By having icons hosted in an icon font, you can load all of the icons you need in a single request. Even if you're using icons from multiple icon fonts, it's maybe 2 or 3 requests - one for each icon font needed. That's much better than say 40 requests to load each individual symbol! And icon fonts are meant for the web. They're small. We're talking kilobytes - so they load very fast which is great for mobile devices with constrained bandwidth. PNGs by contrast much larger on a per-symbol basis and if you're going with animated GIFs - man those can get out of hand really quickly. Accessible - When done right, icon fonts are completely accessible and compatible with screen readers. For those with disabilities that use font-switching browser extensions, all you need to do is add !important to the icon font-family and it won't switch. So text-based fonts that should be switched won't be declared as !important and those font-switchers will swap them out as the user expects. But icon fonts used in the map are declared as !important and thus won't be switched out. ... View more

ArcGIS Online's built-in symbology is...not great. ArcGIS Pro allows you to use SVG files for your layer symbology, but when the publishing process rasterizes the symbol making resizing the symbol post-publishing pretty terrible. If Esri instead supported the use of SVG symbols natively in ArcGIS Online and Portal, this would not be a problem at all. Esri should also convert all of their built-in symbology to SVG instead of PNG. the only place for a raster in a webmap these days is satellite imagery. ... View more