Latest Contributions by JohnMDye

Administrative Groups are new to ArcGIS Online with the June 2019 Update and they seem pretty useful. Eventually, they will make their way to ArcGIS Enterprise and they will be useful there as well. There is one feature they have however, that limits their usefulness within ArcGIS Enterprise: "Administrative groups offer an additional level of control for organizations because they prevent members from leaving the group unless they’re removed by a group owner or manager." - https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/arcgis-online/administration/getting-to-know-administrative-groups-in-arcgis-online/ Dang. Group Owners and Group Managers can remove someone from an Administrative Group? So close, but this is not the type of group I'm looking for.  I need an Administrative Group that is linked to Active Directory, wherein: Membership is controlled by Active Directory Group Owners and Group Managers are unable to remove someone from the group Accounts are automatically created for new users added to a group if one does not exist for them already   What possible use could this have? How about self-managing groups based on Organizational structures?! Most Enterprises use Active Directory (AD). There is a method to the madness of AD. In most cases, the methodology is pretty simple. AD Users are organized into Units, Groups, Departments or something along those lines. With the above in place, an Administrator could: Create a new group in their Portal, let's call it the "Board of Directors" group. Set a person, let's say the "Chairman of the Board" whoever that person is, as the Group Owner Link the "Board of Directors" group to their AD group When this happens, Portal would read the AD group and create accounts for any users in the AD group that did not already exist in the Portal, and add them to the "Board of Directors" group - which would be an "Administrative Group" that they could not leave without leaving the linked AD Group, which in most cases would probably mean the departing user is no longer on the Board of Directors. When the user departs the linked AD group, they go back into the general pool of users or, if they are moved to a different AD linked Administrative Group, poof they get sucked into that Group. I call it, "Organizational Groups" because its based on Organizational Structure. Let's see this in ArcGIS 10.10 /11 whatever comes after 10.9 ... View more

I know an editing experience is in the works for Experience Builder and I am excited to see what the team comes up with. However, I'd say I think there might be a really simple and elegant shortcut here for the team to consider. While the Survey Widget could probably be used to create an editing experience, that's inefficient because you have create a separate survey item for each layer and then really get into the nitty gritty of carefully crafting schemas to make it work. It is possible nonetheless and with enough work, can be pulled off pretty well.  However, there's a simpler approach. JSAPI 4.x already has an Editor and FeatureForm widget. I'm speaking without any knowledge of the details but I would think that both of these widgets could probably be brought into Experience Builder with relatively minor amounts of work. Take the example of the Map View template on a mobile device. It's a beautiful, professional looking map app that works pretty well as it stands today. There's a glaring layout inefficiency here though that cannot be resolved currently. In order to view feature data, you're required to split the viewport between the map and a page. That kind of layout can be useful in many situations but in many others, it just takes away valuable screen real estate. However, many of the Experience Builder widgets such as Basemap Gallery, Measure and LayerList expose their widgets through a panel that slides up from the bottom. Well, if the Editor and FeatureForm widgets were brought into Experience Builder, since those are JSAPI 4.x map widgets I imagine they would also expose their elements through this panel, which would be great because then we would not need to use a survey or some other work around to deliver a simple and intuitive editing experience. Further, if the LayerInfo widget could also be configured to surface in this panel, acting simply as a popup, then there would be no reason to split the screen just to view and edit attributes. The map could consume the entire screen in that case which would be a much more intuitive and pleasant experience. ... View more

I stumbed across the group.notify method in the ArcGIS API for Python documentation and thought it would be useful for sending custom notifications to users when content is marked as deprecated or a group owner leaves the company and we need to notify the remaining group admins so that we can identify a new group owner. I gave it a go to test it out and got a 403 response back. # Sign in to Portal gis = GIS('https://myportal.domain.com/arcgis', getpass.getuser(), getpass.getpass("Password: ")) gis.users.me my = gis.users.me for group in my.groups: if group.title == 'testing': keys = ['admins', 'users'] members = [] for key in keys: for user in group.get_members()[key]: members.append(user) print(group.notify(members, "Test Notification", "This is a test notification", "builtin"))‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍ Specifically, here's the response I'm getting: You do not have permissions to access this resource or perform this operation. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- RuntimeError Traceback (most recent call last) <ipython-input-41-271dd187a943> in <module> 8 members.append(user) 9 print(members) ---> 10 print(group.notify(members, "Test Notification", "This is a test notification", "builtin")) C:\Miniconda\envs\gis\lib\site-packages\arcgis\gis\__init__.py in notify(self, users, subject, message, method, client_id) 5566 "f": "json" 5567 } -> 5568 return self._gis._con.post(url, params) 5569 5570 def get_members(self): C:\Miniconda\envs\gis\lib\site-packages\arcgis\_impl\connection.py in post(self, path, postdata, files, ssl, compress, is_retry, use_ordered_dict, add_token, verify_cert, token, try_json, out_folder, file_name, force_bytes, add_headers) 1181 verify_cert=verify_cert, is_retry=True) 1182 -> 1183 self._handle_json_error(resp_json['error'], errorcode) 1184 return None 1185 C:\Miniconda\envs\gis\lib\site-packages\arcgis\_impl\connection.py in _handle_json_error(self, error, errorcode) 1202 1203 errormessage = errormessage + "\n(Error Code: " + str(errorcode) +")" -> 1204 raise RuntimeError(errormessage) 1205 1206 class _StrictURLopener(request.FancyURLopener): RuntimeError: You do not have permissions to access this resource or perform this operation. (Error Code: 403)‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍ I'm an Administrator of the Organization and Owner of this group. It seems this might be a private method available onl to Esri. If so, not cool. Share the wealth. What is the point of group.notify method if no one can use it? ... View more

Webhooks are a really powerful new feature of ArcGIS Enteprise, allowing org admins and developers to build workflows hat are triggered by events occuring within ArcGIS Enterprise. One of the big limitations of webhooks for many enterprises however is receiving them. Many organizations do not have access to PowerBI, MS Flow, AWS Lambda Integromat, Zappier or other public services to facilitate the processing of these webhooks. ArcGIS Notebooks and Notebook Server are also incredibly powerful features, supporting hosted python runtime environments that can be triggered for execution via the REST APIs Execute Notebook operation. What would be really great would be if we could somehow subscribe a given notebook to a given webhook event and when that webhook fired, the notebook could receive the payload and execute.  This would allow us to have a completely self-contained webhooks environment for both sending and receiving webhook events, processing them and performing some logic based on the event occuring.  ... View more

As of ArcGIS Enterprise 10.8.1, Portal can be configured to hook up to an SMTP server and send emails for Password Resets. That's great, but there's a pretty big oversight here. The emails are plain text. No images, no branding, just words on a screen. There's needs to be a reasonably well featured application to allow org admins to create branded, mobile responsive emails, preferably with tracking analytics of who read it and who didn't at the least. Simple read/not read tracking is pretty easy via tracking pixels that could quickly generated by and downloaded from the Portal server when an email is opened.  We should be able to create multiple email templates and send them to users automagically when certain events occur, which could be done by triggerring the sending of an via Enterprise Webhooks. Exmaples of some useful emails Administrator's could craft might be: Welcome Email: Sent to the new user when the user_added webhook event fires.  Added to Group: Sent to the affected user when they are added to a new group Removed from Group:  Sent to the affected user when they are removed from a group Role Change: Sent to the affected user when their assigned user role is changed. A different email should be able to be created for each user role (including custom roles) so that the Administrator can craft the email sent to contain information that is relevant to the newly assigned role (ie. Your assigned user role has been changed to Publisher. Here are some things to know about this role...) Privilege Change on Assigned Role:  Sent to all affected users when a change in privileges is applied to a role Goodbye Email: Sent to affected user when they are removed from the Portal This could also play into Esri's desire to introduce webhook events for updates to feature services. Then, on a Portal Item's Item Details page, a user could "subscribe" to an item via a button, checkbox or toggle that said something like "Notify me when this item is updated". Esri could go even further with this and allow users to receive daily or weekly emails of changes made to the service all in one email, a sort of digest if you will.. It would also be great if any bouncebacks from the SMTP server due to email addresses not being found  could in turn offer the Administrator the ability to remove the user from the organization. There are so many great options that an application like this could support in combination with webhooks, especially if we could use things like arcade or expression tokens to fill in usernames and other information in an email. ... View more

As of ArcGIS Enterprise 10.8.1, Portal can be configured to hook up to an SMTP server and send emails for Password Resets. That's great, but there's a pretty big oversight here. The emails are plain text. No images, no branding, just words on a screen. There's needs to be a reasonably well featured application to allow org admins to create branded, mobile responsive emails, preferably with tracking analytics of who read it and who didn't at the least. Simple read/not read tracking is pretty easy via tracking pixels that could quickly generated by and downloaded from the Portal server when an email is opened.  We should be able to create multiple email templates and send them to users automagically when certain events occur, which could be done by triggerring the sending of an via Enterprise Webhooks. Exmaples of some useful emails Administrator's could craft might be: Welcome Email: Sent to the new user when the user_added webhook event fires.  Added to Group: Sent to the affected user when they are added to a new group Removed from Group:  Sent to the affected user when they are removed from a group Role Change: Sent to the affected user when their assigned user role is changed. A different email should be able to be created for each user role (including custom roles) so that the Administrator can craft the email sent to contain information that is relevant to the newly assigned role (ie. Your assigned user role has been changed to Publisher. Here are some things to know about this role...) Privilege Change on Assigned Role:  Sent to all affected users when a change in privileges is applied to a role Goodbye Email: Sent to affected user when they are removed from the Portal This could also play into Esri's desire to introduce webhook events for updates to feature services. Then, on a Portal Item's Item Details page, a user could "subscribe" to an item via a button, checkbox or toggle that said something like "Notify me when this item is updated". Esri could go even further with this and allow users to receive daily or weekly emails of changes made to the service all in one email, a sort of digest if you will.. It would also be great if any bouncebacks from the SMTP server due to email addresses not being found  could in turn offer the Administrator the ability to remove the user from the organization. There are so many great options that an application like this could support in combination with webhooks, especially if we could use things like arcade or expression tokens to fill in usernames and other information in an email. ... View more