If you’re working in the Geocortex Mobile or Geocortex Web Designer, you may quickly find yourself in a situation where you need to switch between different services in your production app, versus what you may need to use in your dev environment.
This involves chaining strings from one environment to a different value in another, which can ultimately help improve the way you manage your applications.
To see how simple this is to do on your own, watch the Geocortex Tech Tip below, where we’ll show you both a basic and more complex example of using different environment variables in Geocortex Designer.
Video Transcript.
“Hi, I’m Conner. I am a developer on Geocortex Web and Mobile Designer team. Today, we are going to be talking about using environment variables for application management in Geocortex Web and Mobile Designer. Let’s get started!
The goal we are trying to accomplish today to effectively use environment values for application management. I’ll be demoing with Geocortex Mobile Designer, but everything applies for Geocortex Web Designer.
Environment values are used to chain strings in one environment to a different value in another environment. Let’s see how that’s done.
Here I have a saved map and we’ll add an open URL command to our ‘I want to’ menu. We can see by default that the URL to open is google.com. Let’s change the title to reflect that.
The URL we want our end-users to open is geocortex.com, however as an admin, I’m keeping track of how many times that site is hit per day, and I don’t want it influenced by our QA team. That’s where environment values come in.
So, let’s go to ‘Deploy’, ‘Environment Values’, ‘Add a Row’, and change any instant of Google in our development app to Geocortex in our production app, save, and push to production.
Here we have a deployment summary, showing that Google will be changed to Geocortex. So, let’s push to production. Open ‘Geocortex Go’. We can see our command in our development app, it opens Google like we expected, and – in our production app – it opens Geocortex.
A more advanced use of environment values is swapping out services as you may want different services for your production app than your dev or test environment.
Let’s switch out the service with the buildings layer. So, we’ll add a row and add the service, ‘Save’, ‘Push to Production’. In our summary, we’ll see that our web map has changed, which is expected, we’ll push to production.
We can see that our dev app remains the same, but our production app is using a different service for the buildings layer.
Thanks for listening and I hope that you learn something new today, and I’m looking forward to seeing how you take advantage of environment values for your apps.”
Interesting in learning more about the Geocortex Mobile and Geocortex Web Designer? Click the buttons below to get more product information, or to book a personal demonstration.
Contributors