ArcGIS Explorer Blog : Custom Task

Google StreetView Task

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 20:57:00 GMT

If you watched the Plenary session at the 2008 ESRI User Conference, one of the tasks demonstrated during the ArcGIS Explorer presentation was called StreetViewer. StreetViewer is a “smashup” of ArcGIS Explorer and a Google Street View service that Explorer development team members Rob Dunfey and Michael Waltuch collaborated on. We blogged about the presentation earlier, and here's an example showing the StreetView near the ESRI Campus.

The Official Google Maps API Blog describes Street View as a service that “allows users to view 3D panoramas of various locations around the world and to navigate around neighborhoods as if they were (almost) really there.”

The Explorer task lets you grab a coordinate from the map and if a Street View image is available for the location, the task creates a result at the location and its associated popup window displays the Street View image at the coordinate. You can interact with the image inside the popup window, looking around the panorama and follow the path of the nearby streets. It’s a really cool service.

Since the conference we’ve had a bunch of requests to make the source code for this task available, and have recently posted a project at ArcScripts that has everything you need except for a couple of things. We'll describe them here, and how to get everything set up and working.

First, you’ll need to make changes to a copy of the file named panoAvailable.html that’s part of the project. After making changes to the file, you’ll need to move it to a publicly accessible URL from where it will display the Street View image. So, in panoAvailable.html you’ll see there’s a place for you to specify a Google Maps API Key that corresponds to the URL:

If you don’t have a key you can get one at http://code.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html.

PanoAvailable.html contains the Javascript code to receive the coordinate from the task and display the appropriate image as well as the markup required to place the image on the page. You can change the overall graphic design as you see fit.

Next, in the LoadStreetViewQuery’s try block in the project’s CustomTaskControl.cs class, you’ll need to specify the location of panoAvailable.html:

Move a copy of the file to the URL location you specified in LoadStreetViewQuery. Finally, compile the task. You’re ready to deploy it to your users.

Linking to Virtual Earth (or my first custom task)

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 03:09:00 GMT

(submitted by Jonathan Fisk, GIS Solutions Engineer, ESRI Charlotte)

Part of my job is to discover Web based content and services, mash them up, and then show these to others. Many of them don’t realize how easy these are to mashup in this Web 2.0 world. ArcGIS Explorer is a great platform for doing these kinds of things, and I have assembled collections of real time feeds, map views of organizational resources and emergency plans, and tasks that answer timely and relevant questions using Explorer. And sharing is as easy as exporting a result or saving a map.

I’ve recently discovered that ArcGIS Explorer’s result popups can bring more than just an HTML page to life on your map. Below is an example where I call Microsoft Virtual Earth’s API from the popup window when I click on the map to create a yellow map note. The popup window displays the Bird's Eye view of the location.

Why does this excite me? Well, just like the next person, I love to see my house in high resolution from 4 directions (that's not my house above!). But this content can also be used to visually add to more practical applications, and can be combined with other content and tasks in ArcGIS Explorer. By authoring this as a custom task I can create results that can be shared with others or included as part of my map, and I can also enable others to use the Bird's Eye view popup easily. Here's what my task UI looks like currently - just click on the map to create a VE result, then click the result to open its popup window to see the Bird's Eye view.

The first time I tried this I used the brute force method - I went to Microsoft’s Virtual Earth API documentation and tried to make their example Birds Eye view of the Seattle Space Needle pop up in a browser.

Next, I created a note result using the Create Note task and then pasted the Virtual Earth API sample into the result popup content, which I accessed via the result property sheet. This consisted of HTML and JavaScript that would run when the popup was opened. The neat thing is it worked! But each time I wanted to do this I would have to create a new map note, paste the JavaScript code into the result popup content, and then manually replace the latitude and longitude values with new coordinates. This was tedious, and the natural solution was to make it a custom task that would automate the whole process.

So I set out to create my very first custom task. Fortunately there is a nice collection of samples included in the ArcGIS Explorer SDK, and one of them did almost exactly what I wanted my task to do. I jump-started my effort using a sample called TrackShapesCS. This sample creates a new map note when the user clicks the map, and automatically populates the popup content window with its latitude and longitude. All I had to do was tweak the custom task in Visual Studio to append my working VE JavaScript sample, and then insert the new coordinates where the Virtual Earth API expects them. I was relieved to find that this was easy, and worked without major surgery to the sample task.

Here's what the code looks like in the popup window properties for an already placed VE result. The lat/long coordinates of for VELatLong() are always obtained from where you click the mouse:

I now have a custom task that I use quite frequently to spruce up a map with Virtual Earth content. And best of all my map content rides along with the NMF document and I can e-mail or post it for others to use.

I have shared my custom task on ArcScripts - Enjoy!

AIRS Curtain Plots Custom Task

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:45:00 GMT

One of the custom tasks shown during the Developer Summit plenary was authored by John Grayson, a veteran of ESRI's Applications Prototype Laboratory. Here's his description of the task.

This ArcGIS Explorer task has been implemented to visualize data collected by the AIRS satellite, a project of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The AIRS site provides the following description of the technology:

The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) looks down at the Earth and measures the infrared brightness coming up through and from the atmosphere. The AIRS optical system splits infrared radiation into its constituent "colors". The effect (but not the technique) is similar to rain drops splitting sunlight into a rainbow. The wavelengths used are sensitive to temperature and water vapor over a range of heights in the atmosphere, from the surface up into the stratosphere. The term "sounder" in the instrument's name refers to the fact that temperature and water vapor are measured as functions of height. AIRS also measures clouds, abundances of trace components in the atmosphere including ozone, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, methane, and sulfur dioxide, and detects suspended dust particles.

The data was preprocessed from its original HDF format into a geodatabase where information about when the data was collected and to which swath it pertained is maintained. Additionally, curtain plots (vertical rasters) for each of the five attributes were generated as a server-side process. The task starts out by reading the geodatabase and enabling the user to specify which date and swatch to visualize. The screen capture below shows the custom task interface, which allows the user to load the data and choose from different types of information to display.

Footprints of each swath are drawn, and below they can be seen as blue rectangles on the globe.

Using the custom task UI, the user can choose from a variety of types. The task uses OpenGL to load the curtain plots for the specified type, date, and swath onto the display. Shown below is the complete set of curtain plots showing carbon monoxide levels for one of the swaths.

A slider control allows the user to quickly visualize one curtain plot at a time, providing a simple exploratory tool to visualize the data in the display. Shown below is one of the curtain plots, and using the task slider the user can move forwards and backwards in the curtain plot sequence.

Here is another example, this one showing ozone levels. You can compare this to the earlier screen capture above in this post showing carbon monoxide levels.

The task leverages the ArcGIS Explorer SDK and it's support for integrating custom OpenGL implementations. The task makes use of exposed events that tell us when the application has finished drawing and when OpenGL calls can be made. OpenGL allows the developer to create tasks that perform visualizations that are not otherwise possible via the Explorer API, and provides a wealth of potential possibilities for the Explorer developer.

BPC and Dev Summit - Some Custom Tasks

bszukalski — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 17:16:00 GMT

Last week was a busy week for the entire Explorer team, with lots of interesting things happening and lots of great discussions in the Showcase area and elsewhere at Palm Springs. We appreciate all of your comments and feedback. We'll be highlighting some of the presentations and those discussions in a series of posts beginning this week.

First, here's a few things that were shown during the ESRI Business Partner Conference and Developer Summit plenaries. We've covered some of the general things that we typically demonstrate in previous posts on the ESRI Federal User Conference, Petroleum User Group meeting, and GITA, so we'll focus on some of the different things that were shown last week.

One of the custom tasks demonstrated is one you'll find on the Explorer Resource Center. Just choose File > Resource Center and choose the Tasks tab.

The one we chose is the Weather Finder task authored by Michael Waltuch, one of the lead designers on the ArcGIS Explorer development team. Just click to open the NMF file, which will add the task to your current session. To learn more about this task click the Description link on the Resource Center entry, or choose About Weather Finder on the task UI. You'll learn the following:

Weather Finder locates the nearest weather station to a specified location and reports its most recent weather observations. The task is based on a reverse geocoding web service located at GeoNames.org. To learn more about GeoNames go to their web site and see the service description.

The popup window associated with the weather station includes a link to the National Weather Service's Telecommunication Operations Center which lists more information and a 24 hour summary for the weather station.

This is a good example of a custom task which has been written using the ArcGIS Explorer SDK to work against an existing Web service - In other words it's a mashup.

Using one of the Portland bookmarks, we right-clicked the pushpin to use the Send To capability to use this location as the starting point for the Weather Finder task. The bookmark itself is the result of a task (the Create Notes task in this case), and when you take the result of one task and send it to another we refer to that as task chaining, and you can read more about that in the Help.

Here's the result of the Weather Finder task, the closest weather station to our Portland bookmark. In this case it's located at the airport. If we click the result pushpin you'll see the latest weather information in the popup, including links to the NOAA site providing more detailed information and historic data for this location.

We also used a task we obtained from the Showcase area on the Explorer Resource Center. The showcase is a place where anyone can contribute tasks, results, or other items they want to share with the Explorer community. We chose the Flickr Task authored by Rob Dunfey, a member of the ArcGIS Explorer SDK team who also authored a blog post with more details about the custom task. This task is another good example of a mashup with other existing Web-based APIs, in this case it uses the Fickr API.

Here we typed in "portland" to return the first 20 Flickr photos tagged with that keyword. Each of the results can be clicked to open a popup displaying the photo.

Another task that was shown was a custom geoprocessing task, authored using the Model Builder in ArcGIS Desktop and published using ArcGIS Server. The task's UI was automatically generated by ArcGIS Server, based on parameters specified by the task author. The ArcGIS Explorer SDK can be used to modify its UI, but we just used the default, automatically generated one.

Here we've used Send To again to use our Portland bookmark as the input location for a 1 and 3 minute drive time analysis.

In upcoming posts we'll cover more of what was shown, including some of the technical details of the plenary and workshop presentations, and also cover some of the things we showed that are coming in future releases.

Explorer at GITA

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 17:56:00 GMT

Over the last couple of posts we've covered ArcGIS Explorer at the Petroleum User Group (PUG) Conference and also the Federal User Conference (FedUC). We're now at GITA, and here's a quick recap of what was presented at last night's ESRI dinner reception, and what will be hightlighted in the ESRI booth on the showroom floor.

Once again Explorer's ability to add a variety of internet content and local data sources was highlighted. For many users this is essential, as many already publish services using ArcIMS and ArcGIS Server, and have wide variety of local data that must be integrated.

The City of Riverside is shown below with a 3D model of a substation. The substation is part of a citywide 3D landscape that was authored in ArcGlobe and published as an ArcGIS Server globe service. Also shown is part of the street scene, showing some of the 3D objects (trees, cars, poles) from the ArcGlobe 3D library, as well as several buildings designed using Sketchup.

Utility assets such as hydrants, poles, pipes, valves, and others can be linked to files like geo-tagged photos shown below. These linked and integrated documents can includes videos, diagrams, work orders, and other files.

A geoprocessing tool was authored that performs network tracing on the electrical network based on a trouble call location, identifying upstream and downstream infrastructure and devices that may be affected.

Explorer at the PUG

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Earlier this week we posted on the Explorer presentation during the plenary at the Federal User Conference.

Here's an overview of the Explorer presentation during the plenary at the Petroleum User Group meeting (PUG), held in Houston last week.

The first part of the presentation was similar to the FedUC demonstration, showing how the default ArcGIS Online maps and a wide variety of other content services, including ArcIMS, ArcGIS Server map and globe services, and WMS services, could easily be accessed and integrated into a common map.

For the next section, Alaska was used as the study area to showcase the ability to add a variety of local data. Shown below are:

a raster (BSQ image) downloaded from the EROS site
a file geodatabase of the ANWR and Area 1002 boundaries
a shapefile with airport locations
a KML file showing soil chemistry downloaded from the USGS Minerals Resource site

Next, Area 1002 was visited, showcasing some of the new symbols available in Explorer (the camera symbols in this case). These notes were linked to popups showing Quicktime panoramas taken by USGS field crews.

The next section highlighted Explorer's capabilities for integrating a wide variety of non-map content based on location. In this case some of the wildcat wells studied by the USGS were shown, with each popup linking to a wide variety of online information published for each well. For example, links could be followed to view the photos of core samples taken at varying depths in each well, and other information such as depths to stratigraphic horizons, gamma ray data, and drilling and geologic reports.

Finally, the demonstration moved to the Gulf of Mexico where several custom tasks were used. Shown below are the fields in play in the Gulf region (the colored splotches indicate varying degrees of oil and natural gas yields) and the outlines of the oil leases in the Gulf (from a geodatabase obtained from the Minerals Management Service).

Leases were selected belonging to a particular oil company (the orange highlighted fields), and all adjacent leases expiring within 90 days were found (the red highlighted fields). This was accomplished using a geoprocessing task authored using ArcGIS Desktop, and published as a task for Explorer via ArcGIS Server.

The expiring leases were then sent to another custom task (by right clicking the result and using Send To) which generated a report for the selected leases, summarizing ownership, the terms of the lease, area, and other information.

Deploying Custom Tasks with Supporting Files

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 19:09:00 GMT

(Submitted by Rob Dunfey, ArcGIS Explorer SDK Team)

I've just uploaded a custom task to the resource center that queries Flickr, the photo sharing website. You can use the task to search for geo-tagged photos that have been 'tagged' with descriptions.

The most obvious path to incorporating geo-tagged photos in ArcGIS Explorer would be to use one of the two XML feeds; Flickr serve, GeoRSS or KML. I opted to use the Flickr web services API instead, giving me far greater control of the photos returned by Flickr. The ArcGIS Explorer custom task framework is ideal for working with such API's, as the custom task executes on a background thread, so the application remains responsive whilst the Flickr database is queried for photos.

Working in Visual Studio, I chose to query the API via the Flickr.NET wrapper developed by Sam Judson – it's proved to be a really reliable wrapper and congratulate and thank Sam on his work. I went for the .NET wrapper as I figured it would make for rapid development, in comparison to making web requests against the native Flickr REST API with the .NET base classes.

Developing a custom task that relies on additional files does prompt some head scratching when it comes to deploying custom tasks. When designing the custom task framework we wanted a simple deployment model that didn't require developers to generate batch scripts or MSI files to deploy their custom tasks. We did this with use of NMF file, allowing the developer to use the NMF file to specify the download location of their task assembly.

<E2TaskUIDescriptions xsi:type='esri:ArrayOfE2TaskUIDescription'>
<E2TaskUIDescription xsi:type='esri:E2CustomTaskUI'>
<Assembly>MyCompany.MyProduct.MyTask, Culture=neutral, PublickKeyToken=null, Version=1.0.0.0</Assembly>
<Class>MyCompany.MyProduct.MyTask.customTaskUI</Class>
<DisplayName>My Task</DisplayName>
<DownloadLocation>
http://www.myserver.conm/MyComapny.MyProduct.MyTask neutral null 1.0.0.0.dll
</DownloadLocation>
</E2TaskUIDescription>
</E2TaskUIDescriptions>

This works fine, unless your custom task relies on more than a single file, as is the case with the Flickr task using the Flickr.NET API wrapper. Fortunately we've accounted for this by making use of compressed folders (zip files). You can zip your task assembly, along with any other required files, and use the download location element of the NMF file to point at the zip file; ArcGIS explorer recognizes the zip file and extracts the content.

<E2TaskUIDescriptions xsi:type='esri:ArrayOfE2TaskUIDescription'>
<E2TaskUIDescription xsi:type='esri:E2CustomTaskUI'>
<Assembly>MyCompany.MyProduct.MyTask, Culture=neutral, PublickKeyToken=null, Version=1.0.0.0</Assembly>
<Class>MyCompany.MyProduct.MyTask.customTaskUI</Class>
<DisplayName>My Task</DisplayName>
<DownloadLocation>
http://www.myserver.conm/MyComapny.MyProduct.MyTask neutral null 1.0.0.0.zip
</DownloadLocation>
</E2TaskUIDescription>
</E2TaskUIDescriptions>

Custom Task Lifecycles

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 17:06:00 GMT

(by Rob Dunfey, ArcGIS Explorer SDK Development Team)

Custom tasks have many different functions, but for all their differences they have much in common. For example, all custom tasks have a task lifecycle, and as a custom task developer it is important you are aware of what this means, and what it means to your task users.

As a task moves through its lifecycle, its status changes. At any given time a custom task has a status equal to one of six values, as listed in the esriE2TaskStatus enumeration illustrated below.

The current status of a task is displayed in the ArcGIS Explorer results panel when a custom task is pending execution, executing, or has been stopped. A custom task has default messages associated with each status value in the esriE2TaskStatus enumeration.

As a custom task developer you have full control over these messages, and are encouraged to set the message associated with a task status to give appropriate user feedback. For example, the default status message when a task is executing is 'MyCustomTaskName - executing' as illustrated below:

Using TaskContext.SetStatusMessage we can change the message associated with the Task executing status:

Having set the status message with the above code, the following is displayed when the task executes:

This message provides more feedback to the user, and is another facet of creating a well-implemented task.

For a comprehensive introduction to the lifecycle of a custom task, view the ArcGIS Explorer TaskContext Lifecycle Diagram which can be found at the ESRI Developer Network (EDN) site as well as in the Explorer SDK Help when you install it.

This is just one of several design patterns you can adopt when developing custom tasks to give your task a familiar look and feel. More tips and tricks can be found in the new ArcGIS Explorer Custom Task Style Guide.

Wikipedia Task

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 17:12:00 GMT

Many of us are heading to various places, some familiar some not, for the Thanksgiving holidays. It's always nice to learn a little more about where we're headed to. The Wikipedia task found in the Explorer Community Showcase is a great way to do just that, and also another great example of a task mashup. It was written by John Grayson of ESRI's Applications Prototype Lab.

To use it, start up Explorer, go to the Community Showcase, and look for the Wikipedia task. Just click to add it to Explorer.

Using the task you can point to the map or use an existing result to seed the Wikipedia search location. Adjust the search radius and number of results to suit.

The task makes use of web services available at geonames.org to search for Wikipedia entries that have a spatial context.

In the Explorer section on ArcScripts, Keith Fraley has also posted his own Wikipedia task, along with source code that you can download. Keith provides the source code and a discussion of the task on his Location Based Soup blog. Thanks Keith!

What's the Weather? Find out with the Weather Finder

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 21:52:00 GMT

Another useful and interesting custom task (written by Michael Waltuch) is found in the Community Showcase section of the Explorer Resource Center. It's a good example of a custom task that leverages an available Web service for use within Explorer.

Weather Finder locates the nearest weather station to a specified location and reports its most recent weather observations. The task is based on a reverse geocoding web service located at GeoNames.org. To learn more about GeoNames go to their web site and see the service description.

To use the task, first go the the Community Showcase, locate the task, and click to add it to Explorer.

We can activate the task and click on our map to find the current weather, or we can use a result as the input location. Let's use Find Place to locate Manhattan.

Now that we've found Manhattan, we'll right click the result and use Send To and choose Weather Finder from the list (we also could have done this via the result popup window).

Now that Manhattan is the Weather Finder search location, click Find. The nearest weather station will be located, and we'll automatically zoom to it. In this case the nearest weather station is found in Central Park.

The popup window associated with the weather station includes a link to the National Weather Service's Telecommunication Operations Center which includes a 24 hour summary for the weather station.

You can also click the link in the popup to show the National Weather Service's Web site for this location. Here we see that currently it's a balmy 57 degrees in Central Park under overcast skies, with 6-mile visibility and calm winds.

Time Navigator Custom Task

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 20:35:00 GMT

Richie Carmichael (of ESRI's Applications Prototype Lab) posted a Time Navigator custom task for Explorer a while back. The task has gone through several iterations and improvements, and the current version (including source code) can be found at ArcScripts.

There's also a YouTube video posted on the task, and Richie also includes a discussion of it at his blog.

We used it the other week for animating some of the fire spread data that we've been compiling. Here it is in use:

You'll also find a number of other tasks for Explorer at ArcScripts, and we'll be adding a direct link to ArcScripts from the Explorer Resource Center soon.

ArcScripts for ArcGIS Explorer

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 03:22:00 GMT

If you're looking for additional tasks for Explorer, and especially if you're looking for their source code too, then don't forget to check out ArcScripts. ArcScripts has long been a valuable resource where the ESRI user community and staff share code.

Currently there are eight entries for ArcGIS Explorer tasks (complete with their source code). Just open the ArcScripts Web site, and choose ArcGIS Explorer from the software list to view the submissions. Click on any entry to view additional detailed information, or to download it. Remember, these are unsupported...

Debugging Custom Tasks with Visual Studio

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 19:42:00 GMT

(Submitted by Rob Dunfey, ArcGIS Explorer Dev Team)

When designing the ArcGIS Explorer API, above all we wanted to make it as simple and easy to use as possible, so people with no development experience would be able to develop their own custom tasks. If this is the first time you have developed using Visual Studio, here are some steps that will help you debug your Explorer custom task.

Build your custom task.
Open ArcGIS Explorer and add your custom task to the map.
Save your new map.
Open the Tools > Options dialog, and set the application to "Open the last saved map" when ArcGIS Explorer starts, then close ArcGIS Explorer.

Inside your custom task Visual Studio solution, open your project properties dialog. This can be done from the project menu.
On the debug tab you will notice a start action to "Start an external program." Check this radio button and use the browse button to select the path of the ArcGIS Explorer excutable (E2.exe). It will similar to:

C:\Program Files\ArcGIS Explorer\Bin\E2.exe

Now click the Run button to start debugging, or press F5. Explorer will start, and open with the last saved map that references your custom task. You can now run your task and step through it using the Visual Studio debugger.