If you’ve ever been in a situation where you’ve found yourself wanting to generate a summary of various forms of feature data together, then you probably understand that there are some limitations on what you can do using the out-of-the-box functionality within Esri’s Web AppBuilder for ArcGIS®.
Fortunately, by adding the power of the Geocortex Reporting widget to your ArcGIS application, you can simplify this process, and produce a great looking and intuitive report that includes aggregations of all the feature data you’d like to summarize.
Today, we’ll show you precisely how that can be doing using Geocortex Reporting.
Video Transcript
“Hi everyone, my name is Patrick Fingler. I work on our technical marketing team and in this video, I’m going to show you how you can generate a summary report with aggregations of feature data.
Let’s take a look!
Okay, so in this video I’m going to show you how to generate a summary report with aggregations of feature data using Geocortex Reporting.
Here I am in Web AppBuilder for ArcGIS®, and currently right now I’m viewing a web map that has some census tracts, and these census tracts can have a ton of demographic data. In this example, I might want to generate a report that has individual data for each census tract, but also provides a summary on the total demographics for all of the census tracts that I’ve selected.
I’ve built a pretty basic report that can be used to generate a report on each individual census tract. If I was to add this report to Web AppBuilder – you can see I’ve added a Geocortex Reporting widget to Web AppBuilder – I would then add a report, and I could optionally choose the layer that I want to connect this to, but I’m pretty happy with that.
Now, if I was just to use Web AppBuilder’s out-of-the-box selection tools – lets select a couple census tracts here – I’ve selected four of them – and if I was to run a report (I’ll just wait for that to run), it will essentially return with a report that has demographic data for each census tract that I’ve selected.
I might want to extend this report further to show a summary of all of the demographic information that I have selected.
Here we can see these are the four census tracts that I’ve selected. I can see that we’ve got the area for this census tract: total population, number of females, number of males, number of homes or houses within this specific census tract, but I might want to generate a summary of this information.
So how do I do that in Geocortex Reporting?
First thing that I’m going to do is create a group header. You can create a group footer as well – either option works, it really depends if you want this information on the top or bottom.
Here I’m going to create a group header, and then I’m going to start pulling in the census tract information and attributes that I want to display. I might want the area, the total population, total female, total male, and total house. I’ll just drag that here.
I’m going to first use this as my heading, so I’ll change these values, so they aren’t actually referencing any data. I’m going to copy that, paste it again and there we’ve got our heading row and our summary.
I’ll create a line here, just to split this up, and it’s starting to look pretty good!
Now lets just change these values, and give this a heading – so change it from area, the value from the expression, the population, total females, total males, and total houses.
I can additionally stylize these, so I might want to select the whole table here and apply some stylization, like a darker background, or bold this. Again, you can play around with your styling as you want.
Here is really where I’m interested in though. This is the bottom table, and this is going to provide a summary of all of the demographic information that we have selected.
In order to accomplish that, first I’m going to make it so that we have some borders around our table. You can see we’ve got an expression here and this is returning the area. If you actually open this Expression Editor up and navigate to the “Functions” tab, you can see that there’s a number of functions available. I’m after the “Sum()” function. This accepts a value and returns the sum of all the expression values in the collection.
I’ll type “Sum” and add some brackets around it (Sum([AREA]) and we’re now going to look at the total area of all the census tracts that we’ve selected.
I’ll just accomplish this for the rest of my items here – I know this is a little bit of a manual process – but it will really save you some time in the long run and produce a really nice report that you can then share with various stakeholders within your organization, or for whatever reason why you might need to summarize your data.
I’m pretty happy with this, and I can probably test this right now from within the designer. If I preview this and pass in maybe two or three ids, this is going to accept the object ids of the census tracts and generate a report based on those three ids. So here we’re getting a total area, a total population, etc. You can see that we’re summing those values, so if you took this value plus this value plus this value, you would get this total area.
Now this doesn’t really look good, so I might want to quickly change this and just round it a little bit. I’m going to use another function. There’s a “round” function in here, and you pass the value around and then the precision.
I might just want to round this, then add a comma, so everything in here is the value, and this is the precision. So I’m going to round it, and I might want to add kilometers squared or something like that.
Instead of previewing it, I’m just going to save this. Now, let’s run it from Web AppBuilder!
I click “done” and run this again without having to refresh Web AppBuilder or anything like that. It should immediately pass these four census tracts to my newly-saved report template, and we’ll see that we now have that group header which is presenting a summary of my data in a nice and concise report.
We can see that the total area now is 10.78 km2, most of that coming from these two larger tracts. We can get a breakdown of the total population, total number of females, total males, and total houses for these four tracts we’ve selected.
I hope that was helpful! Bye for now.”
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