One of the big features that came with release of Geocortex Essentials 4.12 was the implementation of smart mapping capabilities available in ArcGIS Online. Now, you have the ability to import your web maps that were outputted from ArcGIS Online directly into a Geocortex viewer!
This gives you the flexibility to preserve more information in Geocortex Viewer for HTML5 (GVH) that contains the same visual aesthetic that you would normally see in ArcGIS Online, like legends and complex symbology.
In today’s tech tip video, we’ll show you how this is done! You will learn how to configure smart mapping renders in an ArcGIS web map, add them to your Geocortex Essentials site, and then view them in GVH.
Video Transcript
“Hi, my name is Jonathan, and I’m the Lead Developer on the Geocortex Viewer for HTML5. Today I’d like to show you how you can take smart mapping symbology created in ArcGIS Online and import it into GVH with a web map reference.
Let’s get started!
Today, we’re going to talk about smart mapping renders and how you can configure these in an ArcGIS Online web map and add them to your Essentials site and then view them in the Geocortex Viewer for HTML5.
To get started, I’ve got this ArcGIS Online item here called the ‘LA Smart Mapping,’ where I have configured a number of layers with what Esri calls, ‘Smart Mapping’ renderers. If we open this in the map viewer, we can see them.
Here we have one layer. This is actually the census tracts layer for LA County, and we’ve configured very complex symbology for this, which uses the size of a point on the centroid and the bivariate relationship between two variables to plot the color and then also the size of the circle is dependent on another variable.
So, we have three variables at play in this one renderer on the map, and we can kind of see a little bit of a spatial relationship, which is starting to appear with the average household size, the amount of single female householders and the numbers of those the total number of families with children in that census tract.
If you go back to our ‘Content’ page here. I can just show you a little bit about how this is configured. Basically, when you configure any renderer in ArcGIS Online and you will go to this wizard and you will select maybe one, but maybe two or three variables to create your renderer and then you’ll go through these wizards where you set up.
Ok, I would like to see a relationship between two variables and then you can say a bunch of different options here with how you would like to configure this, how you would like the brakes to be calculated, etc and you can get quite detailed here with configuring different symbols and scale levels and transparencies. It’s very powerful. A lot of different types of renderers that you can create, this is just one example.
I’ll how quickly show you a simpler one here. This is a clean streets index, so what we’re looking at here is that if it has a higher category score – that is if the streets were apparently cleaner -then the census tract is plotted more opaque, and if the streets were apparently dirty, it is less opaque. The colors are the various commissions that are responsible for keeping track of this.
You can see this looks like a fairly normal renderer that you might have created before, but the addition of the transparency to this means that it’s not just a simple unique value renderer of the type that we’ve been able to display in GVH for forever. This counts as a smart mapping renderer and to configure these right now, you have to import them from a web map reference as I’m going to show you.
If we go over to my GVH site in Essentials and this is just a copy of the LA County sample site to which I’ve added a reference to the web map that you were just looking at. So, that makes those layers that were configured in the web map available to populate in the layer list, and unfortunately the smart mapping reminders do not work in Essentials itself. If I turn this on, I won’t see that type of renderer here, but I will see it in GVH where we have added to support.
If I just go here, and into my viewer configuration and I will launch this in browser. When it loads up and we can go and turn on the ‘Smart Mapping’ layer, and there you can see that’s the one that we were looking at with the relationship between the three variables. We can see in our inline legend here how that relationship is defined, and we can see the same legend that you saw in ArcGIS Online.
We can look here, the other one that I’ve got configured the ‘Clean Streets’ index when we just took a look at and then you can see the legend for that. There are also a couple of others, education levels which is predominant category renderer based on the level of education that most people have attained in that specific area.
Again, we’re plotting the centroid of a census tract here, and we’re using transparency to show the strength of the predominance and the size of the circle to show the numbers of total people in that area.
One more that’s configured here is enriched transit stops. These are basically bus stops and we’ve enriched them with data about who is the predominant category of person using this bus stop and how much does it get used.
Basically, the same type of render as the other one.
These are a bunch of complex examples except for this one, but the sky’s the limit here, really – you can configure almost any type of renderer right now that you can imagine in ArcGIS Online and you can also display these with their full legends in GVH.
I hope that some of you find that useful and come up with some really cool renderers to display in your viewers.
Thanks for listening. Have a good day!”
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