There’s a new way to easily search your mapping data.
The ArcGIS JavaScript API’s new Search dijit precedes the Geocoder dijit (now deprecated). It’s been re-imagined, renamed and redesigned to provide a single searching and suggestion experience. It allows you to search across multiple Locator and Feature Layer services from a simple interface.
Whereas the Geocoder dijit’s intention was for searching only Locator tasks, the Search dijit was designed to handle multiple types of “sources,” including Locator tasks, Feature Layers and potentially more. The user interface has also been improved to handle searching one more of these sources. With the Search dijit, you can search or get suggestions from all the defined sources or a single source.
Much of the same functionality found in the Geocoder widget is also present in the Search dijit, but many new features have been added and redesigned for a better user and developer experience. As a developer, it should be easier for you to configure the Search widget and less code to write in order to handle common searching tasks. The icons for the widget use a font, so properties like the color or size can easily be modified.
New Features include:
- Ability to search and get suggestions from Feature Layers
- Automatically add Feature Layers from a map to the widget
- Display additional search results to a user in the popup as “more results”
- Highlight a result with a symbol
- Label a result with a text symbol.
- Results for suggestions and searches are separated and have different events
- Optional button-mode to expand or collapse the search interface from a single button
- Easily set an InfoTemplate to display custom popup information for a result
- Individual placeholders for each search source... and more
Have fun exploring the demos or implementing it in your app.