What's new

The ArcGIS Experience Builder update includes new widgets, new templates, and additional widget settings. Highlights are listed below.

• Access—Only the app owner, organization administrators, and members of shared update groups to which an app is shared can open an experience in the builder.
• Data actions—Adds two new data actions—Statistics and Add to table. Experience Builder now supports two levels of data actions. Data-source level actions affect all the records in an entire data source. Record-level actions only affect selected, loaded, or the current record.
• Dynamic content—You can provide custom labels for statistics in the statistics editor. To set a label, replace the placeholder text, which acts as the default label and changes based on the operator and field you specify.
• General settings—The General tab on the left of the builder opens the new Experience settings or Template settings panels, where you can configure general settings for your app or template. You can use item settings to change your app or template's favicon, thumbnail, and summary. You can use time zone settings to choose how Experience Builder handles time-based data from different time zones. You can also use the settings under Manage URL status to control which URL parameters appear in the URL at run time.
• Grid pages—The Allow expansion check box now appears on the Style tab for widgets nested in a grid. You can use this to override the Allow expansion check box that appears in a grid page's settings. This is useful if you want users to be able to expand some grid items and not others. This enhancement also applies to Grid widgets.
• Location Referencing—Adds six Location Referencing widgets. You can use these widgets to manage pipeline data with ArcGIS Pipeline Referencing and roadways data with ArcGIS Roads and Highways. You can read more about these widgets in the Widgets section below.
• Login—If an app includes widgets, data, utility services, or other components that requires an account with certain privileges, a banner appears when the user accesses the app without the required credentials. The banner lists all the parts of the app that the user cannot access and prompts them to sign in with another account or ignore and continue without access to things. If the user chooses to ignore, the app does not request credentials again until the user refreshes the app.
• Mobile optimization—When you are editing layouts for small-screen devices, large configuration panels that previously appeared on the canvas now appear in the builder margins. Large configuration panels include the Dynamic content panel, the Quick style panel in the Button, Divider, and Views Navigation widgets, and more.
• Searching—The Search, Table, and List widgets use full-text search to generate search suggestions. Full-text search is an efficient search method that uses full-text field indexes, which divide records into small searchable units, such as individual words. This is a breaking change. Previously, all three widgets used CONTAIN %abc% to find suggestions, meaning the search phrase could be anywhere in a record. However, full-text search does not find phrases in the middle of words. For example, before this release, typing alt to search for United States cities could return the suggestions Baltimore, Maryland and Alton, Texas. Now, of those two cities, full-text search only suggests Alton, Texas. The Search, Table, and List widgets continue to use CONTAIN %abc% to generate search results.

  Learn more about searching for features in maps and apps

• Templates—Adds the Lens multipage template, the Comparatist scrolling page template, and five new full-screen page templates—Panorama, Dashboard, Plateau, Preface, and Sleuth. You can identify these new default templates by the New badge on their thumbnails in the Templates gallery. All templates created by Esri have an official Esri badge. Templates on the ArcGIS Online tab of the gallery are now organized by category, including Environment, Tourism, and Infrastructure. You can list a public template under a category by specifying that category on the template's item page.
• URL parameters—Adds five new Map widget parameters which you can use to define the map center, scale, rotation, viewpoint, and layer visibility. Adds two new Search widget parameters, which you can use to show the search source and search input. Also adds the block parameter, which you can use to make the app go to a specific block on a scrolling page. The new data_s parameter replaces data_id as the parameter for selecting data records. URLs with the old data_id parameter continue to work as expected and automatically adjust to the new parameter when selections update. All Map and Search widget parameters and the data_s parameter follow a hashmark (#) instead of a question mark (?). For more information and for examples, see URL parameters.
• Utility services—You can add geoprocessing services and individual geoprocessing tasks in the Utility services panel. A geoprocessing service is a collection of geoprocessing tools, or tasks, published to a server site to perform operations necessary for manipulating and analyzing geographic information. You can use geoprocessing services with the new Analysis widget.
• Windows—The new Block page setting appears for fixed windows. If you turn off this setting, you can make a window non-modal, meaning users can interact with both the window and the page while the window is open. Window templates are organized into three categories—fixed blocker, fixed passthrough, and anchored.

Widgets

Other improvements include the following new and updated widgets:

• Add Line Event widget (new)—Allows you to create new line events along routes in a Linear Referencing System (LRS).
• Add Point Event widget (new)—Allows you to create new point events along routes in a Linear Referencing System (LRS).
• Analysis widget (new)—Adds analysis tools to an app. You can choose from 64 built-in spatial analysis tools and more than 100 built-in raster functions. You can also add custom geoprocessing tools.
• LRS Identify widget (new)—Allows you to identify a route location on the map and view measure values and attributes of any underlying events.
• Merge Events widget (new)—Allows you to merge two or more linear events that are part of the same Linear Referencing System (LRS) line event feature class.
• Near Me widget (new)—Allows you to find and summarize data about features within a certain distance of a defined location. The location can be a selected feature, a drawn graphic, or a location defined by another input method. You can also find features based on the current map extent. The widget can perform three types of analysis: find the feature that is closest to the defined location, find all features within a specified distance of a defined location, or summarize numeric values of nearby features using statistics functions and SQL expressions.
• Search by Route widget (new)—Allows you to search for a route or portion of a route and locate specific locations along it in a Linear Referencing System (LRS).
• Select widget (new)—Allows you to select features using attribute selection, interactive map selection, and spatial selection. You can enable various message and data actions that allow you to perform data processing tasks with a selection. The widget displays selections made with other widgets, like Table and List widgets, meaning you can select a feature in another widget and run data actions on that selection with the Select widget.
• Split Event widget (new)—Allows you to split a line event into two adjoining events in a Linear Referencing System (LRS).
• Add Data widget—Supports uploading GPX files. If you click the Type button to search for specific data types in ArcGIS content, you can now search for group layers. Feature collections containing multiple layers appear in the group layer category when you filter by layer type.
• Bookmark widget—Bookmarks for 3D web scenes can honor the daylight and weather values from when the bookmarks were set. Selected bookmarks now show a selection highlight. You can drag to reorder bookmarks in the widget's settings. Bookmarks added at run time now have map thumbnails based on the map area they represent.
• Button widget—You can use a Button widget to open and close a Sidebar widget. To do this, add a Button widget to your app. On the Action tab of the Button widget's settings, add the Button click trigger, select a Sidebar widget as the target, and select the Toggle sidebar action.
• Business Analyst widget—You can use the new Search setting to turn the Business Analyst widget's map search tool on and off. The new Data source drop-down menu lists available data for the selected country or region. Some countries and regions have multiple available data sources. You can customize the introductory text in Preset mode. You can set a default infographic in Workflow mode. The widget supports changes you make to colors and fonts on the Theme tab in the builder. The improved navigation and infographic searching experience in Workflow mode allows you to search for infographics by name, sort by name and creation date, and view preview thumbnails.
• Card widget—You can use Auto and Custom layout modes, similar to the Experience Builder mobile optimization layout modes, to design a card's hover state layout. In Auto mode, the settings of any nested widgets are synced across the default and hover states. This mode is appropriate if you only want to change the card's content settings, such as background color, between the default and hover states and don't need to change any nested widget settings. Custom mode creates separate layouts for the card's default and hover states.
• Chart widget—You can use pie charts to customize hover and data labels by changing the label text, providing a minimum or maximum amount of decimal places, turning on a thousands separator, and more. You can also use pie charts to provide a maximum width in pixels. You can turn off hover labels in all chart types. When you are selecting a category or number field, you can also search for fields. For column, bar, line, and area charts, you can use the new Split by field setting to split a category field by another field. If you define a split-by field, the data from the category field is split into multiple data series (that is, one series for each unique value in the split-by field).
• Directions widget—The Directions from and Directions to data actions have been added. You can use these data actions to allow users determine a route's start or end point by selecting a point feature from a Map, Table, List, Query, or Feature Info widget.
• Draw widget—The 3D drawing effect option, Relative to scene has been added. Using this effect, you can draw features on top of extruded polygons, 3D Object SceneLayers, or BuildingSceneLayers, depending on which one has higher elevation. If a drawing is directly above a building or any other feature, it is drawn at a specific elevation relative to that feature. If a drawing is not directly above a building or any other feature, it is aligned to the elevation of the ground or the IntegratedMeshLayer.
• Edit widget—You can configure default run time snapping settings in the widget's settings. You can use Prescriptive mode in the widget's settings to set predefined snapping settings that are unchangeable at run time. Editing privileges now depend on where you access the Edit widget (in the builder versus in an app at run time) and your account type. For a full list of rules and privileges, see Edit widget documentation. If you turn on tooltips at run time, you can press Tab while drawing to type in values for segment lengths, angles, and elevation. These new editing constraints allow for more control and efficiency while drawing in 2D and 3D.
• Elevation Profile widget—You can use the new View elevation profile data action to generate an elevation profile for a line feature from another widget. The widget also adds Match Profile as a method for getting elevation values for features that intersect a profile.
• Filter widget—Supports group filters. You can use the Group SQL Expression Builder to make logical expressions for group filters, which filter multiple data source fields based on common values. You can duplicate filters and group filters.
• Fly Controller widget—You can set the camera to rotate around the map center, which is always the point at the center of the user's current camera view.
• Grid widget—The Allow expansion check box now appears in the Style tab for widgets nested in a grid. You can use this to override the Allow expansion check box that appears in a Grid widget's settings. This is useful if you want users to be able to expand some grid items and not others. This enhancement also applies to grid pages.
• Image widget—The Fill rendering option is supported on iOS and macOS devices.
• Map widget—Adds the Extent navigate tool. The widget can display pop-ups on the map when the user selects map features in another widget, such as a Table widget. Additionally, the widget supports data actions that appear in pop-ups. The Select tool has several updates. The lasso select mode supports freehand drawing. You can use keyboard shortcuts to add to, remove from, or select a subset from the current selection. The selection tool button now becomes a progress button when you make a selection. This is useful when you select a large amount of features and the selection process is taking a long time. You can click the progress button to stop the selection process and work with the features selected up to that point. You can turn on client-side queries for your web maps in the Map widget's settings. The advantages of client-side queries are decreased demand on the server and improved app performance. Client-side queries greatly reduce the number of network requests made to a server. A common Experience Builder app configuration that can be demanding on servers is a List widget that updates based on the current map extent. If you have such an app, you can avoid overloading servers by turning on client-side queries. In addition, client-side queries are faster than server-side queries. Data-related tasks, such as selecting a feature to update a chart, perform faster.
• Map Layers widget—Unique layer configurations for individual Map Layers widgets are supported even if they are connected to the same Map widget. You can allow users to search for layers by name and drag layers to reorder them at run time. The new Use tick boxes to control layer visibility setting replaces the Toggle layer visibility setting. The widget supports five data source level data actions—Add to table, Export, Set filter, Set location, and Statistics.
• Print widget—You can turn off the Preview print extents button, which allows users to visualize the area of the map that appears in the printout. Supports report templates. You can print using report templates if you connect to a print service that is published with ArcGIS Enterprise 11.2 or higher and supports reports. The ArcGIS Online default print service currently does not support reports. The widget also supports custom layout items and custom report items. If you upload .pagx layout files or .rptx report files to the same ArcGIS organization that hosts the connected print service, those layouts and reports are available to select under Use layout from layout item and Use report from report item on the Template configuration panel in the widget's settings. You can duplicate templates.
• Search widget—If you configure multiple search sources, users can use the All check box to turn every source on or off at run time.
• Share widget—The Include URL parameters check box that appears at run time allows users to include any active URL parameters in the URL to be copied. Users can uncheck this box to share the experience's original URL without any parameters.
• Sidebar widget—You can use a Button widget to open and close a Sidebar widget. To do this, add a Button widget to your app. On the Action tab of the Button widget's settings, add the Button click trigger, select a Sidebar widget as the target, and select the Toggle sidebar action.
• Survey widget—You can populate survey questions with data from a feature selected in a web scene. The scene layer must have an associated feature layer.
• Swipe widget—You can swipe through layers added with an Add Data widget at run time. The widget has two arrangement styles, Panel and Bar. You can use the Default activation setting to have the swipe tool be turned on by default when the widget first loads. You can allow users to change layer visibility at run time.
• Table widget—You can add the Set filter data action, which allows users to filter a table with SQL expressions at run time. If you turn on Auto refresh for the connected data source, you can include a message that indicates when the table last updated. You can also include counts of total and selected records. You can use a layer's default settings to determine which fields appear for initial display, which fields are visible, and which fields are editable. You can select records on sheets opened at run time. There are now two table-related data actions that you turn on in the settings of other widgets, View in table and Add to table. Both are for sending records from another widget to a table. The difference is in which records. Add to table is a data source level action, meaning it sends all records in an entire data source to the Table widget. View in table is a records level data action, meaning it only affects selected, current, or loaded records.
• Timeline widget—Second is now an option for the minimum time accuracy unit.
• Utility Network Trace widget—You can generate a polygon graphic around trace results. The shape of the graphic can be a convex hull or a buffer. A convex hull is appropriate when creating one large result area encompassing trace results from disconnected areas. Buffers are appropriate when creating separate result areas for each trace result. The widget generates an output data source that other widgets can use. Additionally, you can configure message actions in the widget's settings. The Utility Network Trace widget can be the source for the Record selection changes trigger.
• Widget Controller widget—If you have widget panels open in a fixed position, you can make that position the exact middle of the page. You can add layout widgets, like Column and Row widgets, to a Widget Controller widget. You can set a fixed widget panel's width and height to Stretch. If you do, the panel stretches to fill the area of the canvas within the Top, Bottom, Left, and Right margins, which you can define in pixels or percent of the canvas. You can turn on indicator lines that communicate which widgets are active. You can use the Expand and Collapse buttons to change the amount of space that panels take up without fully closing them.