Esri Landscape Modeler Application

Screenshot of Landscape Modeler

This week the Landscape Modeler application that was previewed at the International User Conference in June has hit the ArcGIS Marketplace.

Landscape Modeler is a web application that allows users to perform fast weighted overlay analysis at multiple scales or over a large area. This is ideal when there are multiple users that want to develop their ideas about suitability analysis models and share their results with each other.

You can find out more about Landscape Modeler listing on ArcGIS Marketplace (don’t worry, it’s free to any user with an ArcGIS Online organizational account). However, I wanted to mention a few things that I find interesting about this application from a developer’s perspective.

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Landscape Modeler Application Presented at Esri UC 2013

The Landscape Modeler application that I’ve been working on was presented during the plenary session of the 2013 Esri International User Conference. Lanscape Modeler is a JavaScript application that enables ArcGIS Online users perform weighted overlay analysis with the new landscape datasets that Esri is hosting on ArcGIS Online. The application is able to perform real-time weighted overlay at scales ranging from that of a city to the entire country by leveraging the ability of ArcGIS image services to apply raster functions on the fly.

Below is a video of the quick 2 minute run through that Suzanne Foss presented in San Diego where she demonstrates how to use the application to develop a conservation plan for an area outside of Santa Cruz:

The app will be released in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

Community Maps Contribution Management Application Released

For the better part of my first year at Esri, I have been working on a web application for the Community Maps Program that would make it easier for program contributors to upload and manage their data contributions. We released a minimally viable version of the web application in the fall of 2012 which focused on letting users register for the program and upload data. Since then we have focused on creating an application that lets users manage the complete lifecycle of their contributions from upload, through data review, map cache generation, and finally incorporation into the Esri basemaps. This version came out of beta at the beginning of this month.

The application is for program participants only, but if you are interested in learning more about or contributing to the program you can learn more by visiting the ArcGIS Online features page for Community Maps.

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Creating Mapping Applications with the ArcGIS API for JavaScript and Dojo Bootstrap

When the design team doesn’t do Dijit*

Recently, our design team delivered a functional HTML wireframe that was developed with Twitter Bootstrap. Ordinarily that would not be a problem, but the application we’re working on is based on the ArcGIS API for JavaScript and as such relies entirely on Dojo. The developers wanted to be able to leverage as much of the designers work as we could without having to include jQuery – a dependency of Bootstrap’s JavaScript components. A little digging around lead me to Kevin Andre’s Dojo Bootstrap project – a pure Dojo implementation of Twitter Bootstrap. We were able to successfully use Dojo Bootstrap in our ArcGIS API for JavaScript based mapping application. This enabled us to leverage the declarative mark up and styles already written by the designers without adding a jQuery dependency.

Just in time for the 2013 Esri International Developer Summit, I’ve created a simple application that demonstrates how to incorporate Dojo Bootstrap with the ArcGIS API for JavaScript:

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How to Build a 5 Ft Tall Web Map, and Why You’d Want to

Recently, the major electric utility that I work for installed a wall full of 50”displays in their power outage response control center, and they asked me to start generating content for it. The content would be real-time summary data of the power outages across the utility’s electric distribution network, and the centerpiece was to be a map showing the location of all the current power outages affecting their customers.  This was an exciting challenge for me, since I’ve never created applications to be run on large screens with no human interface devices – keyboards, mice, etc. I was particularly excited about figuring out how to implement the map, since I typically develop mapping applications that are meant to be experienced inside of a web browser.

IMG_20111017_112021

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City of Pasadena Interactive Map Enhancements

The enhancements that I’ve been making to the interactive map on The City of Pasadena’s web site went live yesterday!

About the Project

The Google Maps based interactive map was originally developed (by another consulting firm) to help residents identify what neighborhood and city council districts they lived in.  A user entered an address, and the page would display a marker on the map with an info window listing the location’s city and neighborhood council districts.  Below the map the page would show a street view panorama of the location.  The user also had the option of viewing the city council district boundaries on the the map as KML overlays.

The City wanted to enhance the page by also displaying nearby features (such as libraries, transit stations, etc.) on both the map and the list.

Screen shot of The City of Pasadena Interactive Map

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myjoglog.net – Iteration 3: MVC Membership Provider-based Access Control

In my previous post in this series, I determined that I had to start looking into how MVC handles access control before moving forward. I came up with a list of functional specifications that I needed to write proof of concept code right away to learn how ASP.Net MVC helps (or hinders) me in implementing access control. In this post, I’ll look at the first 2 specifications:

  1. Authenticate individual users and mange their credentials (i.e. a MembershipProvider)
  2. Manage access to functionality based on membership (i.e. a MembershipProvider)

I know that in MVC, controlling access to controller actions (and thereby the associated views) is done via a specific type of ActionFilter called an AuthorizationFilter. Also, the ASP.Net MVC Web Application template includes code that shows how to use an ASP.Net membership provider to enable user registration and login. So, a quick test that will tell me if the built-in AuthorizationFilter will be able to meet the first 2 functional specifications above is to add an authorization filter to the Add action of the Workouts controller so that only users that have logged in will be able to add a workout.

I do this by changing the attribute for the Add method from:

AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Get)

to:

AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Get), Authorize()

Now when trying to add a workout, a user is redirected to the login page. After registering and logging in the user is now able to add workouts!

In the next installment I will try to convince myself that I can control access to actions based on user’s relationship to an entity (i.e. members can only delete their own workouts).

Stay tuned…

myjoglog.net – Iteration 2: User Stories

Creating User Stories

Now that I’ve got a feel for how MVC handles the mechanics of a data-driven application, I’ve got to take a step back and think about how users are going to use the application. For a start, here’s what I came up with:

  • The site will allow anyone (both anonymous and logged in users) to view all recently logged workouts.
  • The site will allow users to create an account and thereby become members.
  • Members will be able to log their own workouts.
  • Members will be able to add events that they are training for.
  • Members will also be able to join one or more teams. A team is a group of members (e.g. that may train together or who are training for the same event).
  • Teammates (members of the same team) will be to see each others’ complete workout logs
  • Teammates will be able to subscribe to updates (i.e. via a feed, e-mail alerts, or iCal) to the logs of their teammates.
  • Only certain members will be able to create, own, and manage a team.

I’m sure these and other stories will get more flushed out as the project evolves, but that’s plenty for now.

Turning Those Stories into Specifications
From these stories I’ve derived some entities (the nouns) that I’ll be working with:

  • Member – a user with an account
  • Workout – um, a workout
  • Event – a race (10K, marathon, triathlon, etc) that a member is training for
  • Team – a group of members

I can see from these stories that the application will need to be able deliver certain functionality that I haven’t yet implemented in MVC. Specifically, the application will need to:

  1. Authenticate individual users and mange their credentials (i.e. a MembershipProvider)
  2. Manage access to functionality based on membership (i.e. a MembershipProvider)
  3. Manage access to functionality based on the user’s relationship (i.e. “owner”, or “teammate”) to a particular entity (workout, member, team, etc)
  4. Manage access to functionality based on roles (i.e. a RoleProvider)
  5. Return content in multiple formats (HTML, rss, iCal???)

That all looks like pretty vanilla stuff for a WebForms application, but I’ll have to convince myself that it will all work out in the MVC world.  So it’s time to write some proof of concept code to convince myself I won’t get stuck.

Stay tuned…

myjoglog.net – Iteration 1: Completing the Workout Life Cycle

So, if you read my first post in this series, you know I’m creating a MVC web application to log and share workouts. Picking up where I left off, I’ve got to complete the life cycle of a workout (insert, select, update, and delete).

Completing the Life Cycle of a Workout

In the first post we covered adding a new workout, and selecting recent workouts. That leaves updating and deleting workouts. To save time we’ll just implement the delete functionality and leave updating for later. To enable deleting all I had to do was add a controller action that would perform the delete operation against the database and add forms to the default view that would post to this controller action.

The new controller action in WorkoutsController.vb:

Note that the action only accepts HTTP POST requests and that it expects the MVC framework to map an input value to a local integer variable called workoutId which it then uses to query and delete the workout record in the database.

The new forms (one for each row) in Index.aspx:

Delete Workout Form

This will write a form that contains a delete button and hidden input for the WorkoutId for each row in the table. Clicking on the Remove button on any row will delete the record and redirect the user back to the home page. You can try it out here:

http://myjoglog.net/workouts/

Wow, that was easy and I was able to implement it in about a dozen lines of code or so. I <3 MVC.

In my next iteration, I’ll create some user stories to see what direction I need to go from here. I know, I know, this is a little backwards. I probably should have started with pen and paper (and what of unit tests???) and then gotten into the code, but MVC is new to me, and I needed to write some code just to understand the life cycle of a page. Besides, better late than never, right?

Stay tuned…