VertiGIS Studio Workflow provides the tools you need to build interactive widgets to meet any goal! With an expansive activity library and a simple drag-and-drop interface, anyone from seasoned developers to non-GIS users can easily create the apps they need to streamline and strengthen their business operations.
This Tech Tip provides an overview to using VertiGIS Studio Workflow. With a demonstration on how to build simple applications and an explanation on the benefits of using VertiGIS Studio Workflow, it will provide you with all the information you need to start building simple workflows to advance your GIS!
Video Transcription:
Hey everybody, my name is Patrick. In this Tech Tip video, I’m going to provide an introduction to VertiGIS Studio Workflow. Let’s dive in!
If you’re new to Workflow, it’s basically a web-based designer that allows you to configure custom widgets using a flexible low code, flowchart-based interface. You can drag and drop different components to build a custom tool or widget that can be deployed to ArcGIS applications like Web AppBuilder or Experience Builder or even ArcGIS Pro. You can also deploy your workflows inside of our VertiGIS Studio viewers such as our VertiGIS Studio Web and Mobile products.
The idea behind Workflow is to create custom apps without having to write JavaScript code or using an IDE. By using this configuration framework, you can reduce the development time required to deploy custom widgets. You can also tailor the specific unique requirements to your business processes using a variety of different activities that support conditional logic and standard programming techniques. This can help you to improve your end users’ experiences by providing them with a custom-tailored tool that is specifically designed for their unique requirements.
Workflow also allows you to go further and provides opportunities to integrate with different business systems, rest API’s or databases. There’s a forms engine that’s built into the product that allows you to create dynamic forms that your end users can interact with. And, as I mentioned earlier, there are very versatile deployment options, so you can create workflows and add them to Web AppBuilder. You can also take those same workflows and add them to our VertiGIS Studio Web product or run them in an offline state in VertiGIS Studio Mobile.
Here you can see we’re in Web AppBuilder and I’ve added a few out of the box widgets such as the “Layer List” control and “Select” features tool. I’ve also added a couple of custom widgets here. I’ve got a widget to “Query Features”, one to “Search Features”, and one to “Add Features” onto the map.
In this scenario, let’s run this workflow to “Query” water lines based on these different user input parameters. I know Web AppBuilder has an out-of-the-box query widget tool but the nice thing with Workflow is that you can really tailor these forms based on your end users’ requirements. It also makes it easy to make this operation for searching for features intuitive for non-GIS users.
In this scenario I’ve given the user the option to search for water lines by filtering features based on the “Map Extent” and based on the “Installation Date”. We could toggle this “Filter by Date” on and off if we wanted to. Maybe we’re interested in finding all the water lines within the “Last 5 Years”. I could also filter water lines based on the “Diameter” size – maybe we want to find all the water lines that are greater than or equal to “300” millimeters in diameter. We can also filter this based on the system, or the material. All these values can be populated based on the coded value domains of your layers, or they can be included and customized in the underlying workflow form.
Let’s run a simple query to find all the water lines based on the “Map Extent” and nothing else. If I click “Query” here, we’re going to return 167 water lines that are being highlighted on the map.
Let’s now search instead for water lines that are within the “Map Extent” and of “Material” type “Cast Iron”. I’m going to go ahead and click “Query”. And now you can see we have 83 water lines that are selected. If we zoom in you can see that they’re being highlighted on the map as well, and they’re all of type cast iron. This is a nice example of how you can build a custom widget and deploy that to your end users to streamline the process of searching for a given asset on the map.
These workflows can also be deployed in different applications. Here we’re in “Web AppBuilder”, and now I’m in our “VertiGIS Studio Web” product which is built on Esri’s 4.x JavaScript API. Here I’ve added a couple of other workflows for doing different operations like integrating with different rest API’s or adding new features onto the map. I have tools for generating directions from different locations, for generating demographic charts through analyses, for filtering data on the map, and so on.
Here is our “Query Features” widget tool. Although it looks a little bit different, it is fundamentally the same tool that we were looking at earlier in this Tech Tip. I can continue to collapse these elements. Maybe in this scenario I want to filter by “Installation Date”. Maybe I want to find all the water lines within the current map extent that have been installed recently, within the “Last 5 Years”. I’m going to go ahead and click “Query.” And again, this is going to return those results and highlight the underlying water lines on the map. We can see that we’ve got 9 water lines that have been returned and if we scroll to the right here, we can see that this is the underlying “Installation Date” for each of these individual features. You can continue to pull in that attribute information accordingly.
So again, that’s pretty much the same workflow running in VertiGIS Studio Web. We can also jump to our “VertiGIS Studio Mobile” product. Here you can see that I’m in an offline application. I’ve downloaded some of this data offline and created a custom tool using Workflow to make it easy for offline field workers to search for assets using the same kind of query tool that we were using before.
This is built using Esri’s ArcGIS Runtime API for .NET so the look and feel is a little bit different, but in general the underlying process is the same. Again, we can “Filter by Map Extent”. Maybe in this scenario I want to find all the water lines that are of “Material” type “Cast Iron” and greater than or equal to “300” millimeters in “Diameter”. I’m going to go ahead and click “Query”. And here you can see we’ve got 73 results. If I click on one of them, you can see that the “Diameter” is at least “300” and the “Material” is “Cast Iron”. Again, this is a nice example showing that the underlying workflow technology can run in these different environments.
Now I’ll show you how you design these workflows. This is done using our web-based designer. To access our web-based designers you can navigate to apps.vertigisstudio.com. Here you can see some of our other products. I’ve mentioned our VertiGIS Studio Web and Mobile tools.
We’re going to go ahead and launch the “VertiGIS Studio Workflow” product. This will take us to our web-based SaaS interface. You can also install this on premise. I’ll sign out because it’s single signed me on. Here you can log in with ArcGIS Online or ArcGIS Enterprise – let’s log in with ArcGIS Online.
Once I’ve authenticated, I’ll have access to the web-based designer where I can choose the type of workflow that I want to develop. I can create a workflow for our Web product, for Mobile, or for Web AppBuilder and so on. I can also look at “Last Modified” workflows. These are workflows stored within my ArcGIS online content that I’ve been working on. For example, this is the query workflow that we just ran.
In this scenario, the idea behind workflows is that our developers can configure these activities that you can drag and drop onto the design surface. There are different options to add programming operations, like doing “If” statements and “For Each” loops, or more GIS-based operations like doing “Buffer Geometry” or “Query Layer”. You can even add mobile operations like “Get Current Position” which can give you the position of your field workers. There’s a large library of activities here for doing things ranging from feature editing to issuing web requests that I encourage you to check out.
We’ll be covering some of these throughout the rest of the Tech Tip videos but in general, the idea is that you can drag and drop them onto the design surface and then provide some inputs to them. They’ll perform some logic and then give you an output which you can then pass from one activity to another. The nice thing is that as you design these workflows, they’re easy to share with other users so you don’t have to be a JavaScript developer to understand a workflow.
In this scenario you can see that I’ve got a “Query Form”. Inside of the form there are different form elements. You can customize the different form elements, again by dragging and dropping. Maybe I want to include the option to “Add a File”, or maybe have the option to “Add a Location” onto the map to filter these waterlines. Or maybe I want to provide a “Number Range Slider” to filter the data by. The idea is you can drag and drop these, adjust some properties for them, and then ultimately save and publish these as a custom widget for your end users.
So again, going back here, I’m inside of this form. We can see that if the user selects the option to “Query” then we will perform the “Query”. “If no features” are found, then we’ll present the user with an “Alert” to try again. If we do have features, i.e., if this is “false”, then we’ll “Show Results” based on the query that they configured in the form. Lastly when you’re happy with your workflow you can save it. It’s going to get stored back inside of ArcGIS Online or ArcGIS Enterprise as an item that you can then share with different groups of users.
Hopefully that gave you a brief introduction to VertiGIS Studio Workflow. I encourage you to watch some of our other Tech Tip videos to learn more. Bye for now!
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