Latest Contributions by RupertEssinger

Hi Mike The easiest way to use your ArcGIS Online maps and data in ArcMap is to look for the 'Open in ArcGIS for Desktop' in the Open menu for the item when you work with it in the ArcGIS Online website. You'll see the Open menu next to the item when it is listed in search results and also if you view the full details page for an item. So from the My Contents listing in the ArcGIS Online website, click on the item to get to its full details page, then click the Open menu to get to the 'Open in ArcGIS for Desktop' command. If you are already in the ArcGIS Online website, this is easier than using the commands in ArcMap because you will likely already be looking at the item(s) you want to use. (Remember that in the ArcGIS Online website, it won't show Desktop-only content like layer packages when you do searches, etc unless you switch to 'Show: All Content' in the header of the page.). The bug mentioned by my colleague above is incorrect. Here's how it works: In ArcMap 10 and 10.1 if you choose the File > Add Data > Add Data From ArcGIS Online command, the window that appears only shows data that can be added as a layer into your existing map, so it filters out web maps because when you open a web map in ArcMap it doesn't get added into your existing map as a layer: it gets converted into a map document and replaces your existing map the same as if you had used the File > Open command to open a new MXD file. If you want to open a web map in ArcMap, use the File > ArcGIS Online command, which gives you access to everything in ArcGIS Online which can be added to or opened in ArcMap. Last thing to note is that if you are using ArcGIS for Desktop 10.0 with any SP, opening a web map in ArcMap will not bring all of that web map's content into ArcMap. You'll only see the basemap and layers based on ArcGIS Server map services. We've fixed this in 10.1, so upgrade to 10.1 when you can if you want to see feature services, hosted map services, layers based on shapefiles, layers based on CSV files, etc. Rupert Essinger ArcGIS development team ... View more

Go to: http://www.arcgis.com/explorer See also the following blog post: http://blogs.esri.com/esri/arcgis/2012/06/15/where-is-explorer-online/ ... View more

Here's an example of what you can do: San Diego Shortlist: http://links.esri.com/san_diego_map This kind of informal, fun map with a small number of features is really easy to make. It is simply seven shapefiles created in ArcMap and then zipped up and added to an ArcGIS Online web map. So I didn't publish this data as services. There are three point shapefiles for my three main categories: food, design and fun. There are four line shapefiles containing the ferry routes and the outlines of recommended neighborhoods, parks and beaches. I symbolized the shapefiles and configured their popups, and then published the map using the default Legend web mapping template that is built into the Share dialog, so there's no coding involved. Tips: 1. All the photos are 200 x 150 pixels so they fit nicely into the popup window and are fast to load. You can store them on any public web server you have access to.  I used an Esri web server I have access to, so the pics in my map have this URL format, for example: http://downloads.esri.com/blogs/places/sandiego/cafe_222.png. You then put the complete URL for each feature into one of the attributes of the shapefile. 2. My place descriptions are fairly wordy, and when you assemble and edit a shapefile in ArcMap text fields can't be longer than 254 characters. So I created five fields in each shapefile to store my description for each place, and divided the sentences in the description up into those fields. Each field is self-contained so none of these sentences runs over across multiple fields. This is fiddly, but one benefit of this is that when the popups are configured using this data, you can control how much descriptive text the user will see. If you think the descriptions are too long, you can simply omit the latter of the five fields so you just get the first part of the description. This may make it easier to re-use the same data in different maps and apps. 3. I added a Website field that contains the full URL to the website for the place. The websites for some places are liable to change so in quite a few cases I set up a redirectable URL and used that in the attribute instead of the actual URL of the place. In this way, if I find that a website has changed, I can simply edit that redirectable URL instead of having to edit the attributes of the features in the web map (or web maps, if the data has been imported into more than one web map). In the popup for each place, I've got a link called Website that launches the URL in the Website attribute. To configure that part of the popup I opened the web map in ArcGIS Explorer Online, which lets you define a link in a custom attribute display that launches a URL stored in an attribute on a per feature basis. 4. In the web map, I hid the line shapefiles from the legend because I want the user to focus on the point places of interest. This is a new feature that was recently added into ArcGIS Online. Look in the menu for any layer in a web map and you'll see a Hide In Legend command. If you want to look at the underlying web map used in this app so you can see the schema of the layers and the configuration of the popups I used, here it is: http://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=1966ef409a344d089b001df85332608f. The map also contains a labels layer created in Explorer Online and also a San Diego trolley network map service published with ArcGIS Server, but these are only used in the presentation that is built into the map, so they are turned off by default. To inspect the attributes for any of the place layers in this map, in the map viewer go to the Contents panel and in the menu next to any of the layers, choose Enable Editing. Then click on any of the places in that layer to open its popup and click Edit at the bottom of the popup. To inspect the attributes in Explorer Online, click any of the places to open its popup and then choose Edit > Edit Popup in the bottom right corner of the popup. If you want to use this shapefile schema as a template for your own data, open the web map in ArcGIS for Desktop 10.1, which will create geodatabase feature class layers for each of the layers in the map. You can use this as a template for editing and then export the layers as shapefiles. ... View more