Using Geocortex Go to preview app configurations [Geocortex Tech Tip]

Geocortex Mobile is the world’s most capable framework for configuring and building mobile offline-capable apps on Esri’s ArcGIS platform.

One of the many interesting capabilities of Geocortex Mobile is that you can use it alongside the companion app, Geocortex Go, to preview the apps you develop and deploy them with ease. Geocortex Go is available for free from the iOS Android and Windows app stores.

In today’s Geocortex Tech Tip, we’ll give you a quick overview of Geocortex Go and demonstrate how it allows both GIS application developers to easily preview their mobile apps during the development process, and mobile agents to quickly access those applications to report on their work in the field.

Watch on YouTube.

Video Transcription

“Hi, I’m Cam Carmichael, I’m the Product Manager for our Geocortex Mobile Viewer.

In today’s Tech Tip, I’ll be introducing Geocortex Go, and showing how it can be used as a companion for our designer app.

Gecortex Go is an important part of the Geocortex Mobile Viewer platform.

As a companion app to our designer, it can be used to preview applications that you’re creating, and it can also be used as an easy way to deploy production apps to your field workers.

Geocortex Go is available for free from the iOS, Android, and Windows app stores.

Here’s the Android listing.

To install it from any of the stores, simply follow the usual install instructions.

Let’s create a new app in our Geocortex Mobile Viewer Designer and see how this works.

I’m going to go ahead and create a new app.

While I wait for that to load, I’m going to go and grab a reference to a web map from my ArcGIS Online account.

Back in the designer, I’m going to go to the map component. I’m going to paste in the reference to the web map. We can see some layers appear indicating that it’s got the right map and I’m just going to go ahead and save this, so we can preview it.

I’m going to jump back to Geocortex Go.

I’m going to log in with my credentials. When I get logged in, I will see a number of apps listed that I have access to.

These are my apps, sorted by last updated in the tech tip app that we just created – it appears at the top of the list.

Let’s go ahead and load it.

This is now a fully functional Geocortex Mobile viewer app running from the Geocortex Go Launcher and I can see the web map that we’ve pulled in.

I can also see some things like this blue I want to menu and some blue highlighting. Let’s go ahead and change that by jumping back to our designer and looking at the branding elements.

I’ll go ahead and change that to this green, save our app, and in the development process now, when I simply come back to Geocortex Go and refreshed my app, you can see now that those things are green.

Any of the updates that I make can simply be viewed by going to refresh app off the I want to menu.

Let’s look at how we could use the same process to deliver applications to our field workers.

I’m going to jump back into our designer. We’ve made all the changes that we want to for this application, we’re really happy with it.

I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to make sure it’s saved and then I’m going to go and hit this deploy button and I’m going to deploy and push this straight to production.

It’s worth noting that there are various deployment strategies that I could use if I wanted to be able to send it to testers before it went to production or if I wanted to be able to stage my changes, I could do that. But, in this environment we’re just going to go straight to production.

When I push this application to production, it’ll create a new instance of the application and if I jump back to Geocortex Go and I return all the way back to the Go interface, you can see now that there’s a production app.

I could share this app with my field workers, and this would be the only app that they would see when they launched Geocortex Go on their device.

If I launch this “Tech Tip” app, the production instance now, you can see that it is exactly as our app was. I can continue to go ahead and make other changes in this app and they won’t become available to my field workers until I choose to publish those to production.

That’s a quick overview of how Geocortex go can be used as a companion app for the Geocortex Mobile Viewer Designer during app development and how it can also be used potentially to deploy apps to your field workers.

Before we leave this Tech Tip if there’s one other aspect I’d like to show.

I’m going to go back to Geocortex Go and I’m going to sign out and down at the bottom here you’ll see there’s a link to try out sample apps.

If you don’t have an ArcGIS identity or if you aren’t in an environment where the designer has created apps for you to work with, you can use this as a mechanism to simply kick the tires and get a feel for how it works.

This is a preview then of all of the functionality of a Geocortex Mobile app, we encourage you to go ahead and download your Geocortex Go from the app stores and try this out for free.

To recap: Geocortex Go is available on iOS, Android, and Windows app stores for free. It can be used as a companion app during the development process. It can be used to deploy apps to field workers, and can be used if you don’t have an ArcGIS identity to simply get a feel for what these apps are like.

Thanks for watching this Tech tip!”

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