For those that have visited the ESRI campus in Redlands, you've probably had lunch at the ESRI Cafe. It's one of the newer buildings on campus and uniquely designed, featuring glass walls and a pleasant outdoor eating area.

We've covered Web cams in previous posts, including a post where we explained how you could use the Yosemite National Park Web cams in popups and how you could import text files with links to Web cams.

We thought we'd show another example of using Web cams in Explorer. But this being a Friday afternoon we thought we'd have some fun and do something a little different. Rather than Web cams that show grand scenic vistas we thought we'd focus on a different kind of scenery - the Web cam in the ESRI Cafe. Note that you won't be able to access this particular cam outside of ESRI, but you can link to any Web cam using more or less the same steps we've outlined here.

First, we'll locate the ESRI Redlands campus by using Find Address.

You'll see a new result appear, and double-click the result to zoom in.

When we click the result pushpin its popup window opens, and at the moment it displays the address information we just entered.

The first thing we want to do is position the pushpin on top of the ESRI Cafe, rather than the geocoded location where it's currently located . To adjust the location right click the pushpin and choose properties, then choose the location property, and use the Get Position button to click on a new location, which in this case will be the rooftop of the ESRI Cafe.

Now that we've place the pushpin where it should be we can change the popup to show the Web cam. ESRI staffers can access the ESRI Cafe Web cam from our internal site, handy when you want to see how busy the Cafe is before heading over for lunch. Here's what the web site looks like (note the Explorer team members posing).

If we open the popup content property here's what's currently there - the address location from our original geocoding result.

To add the Cafe Web cam all we need to do is replace that text with the URL pointing to the Web page with the cam.

And here's what the popup looks like now.

Now that was really easy to do, but we didn't like the fact that we had a large Web page inside the popup when all we wanted was the live Web cam. So we right clicked in the Web page in our browser and chose view source. Scanning the HTML source we found the embed tag which pointed to the cam.

To change the popup to open the cam only, we just copied and pasted the HTML into the popup properties, and added opening and closing HTML tags, shown below:

Here is our final result, showing the popup window opening just the Web cam.