ArcGIS Explorer Blog : Notes

Text, photos, links, and HTML in popups

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 23:25:00 GMT

Popups are an easy way to add lots of different content to your map, and are found with notes as well as views. Here we'll cover the basics of popups, and how you can display text, photos, Web sites, and more.

First, we'll start with a very basic example. Here we've added a note, and typed a string into the popup (in popup edit mode).

Now when we show the popup, the results are pretty obvious and exactly as you'd expect.

Now let's spruce things up a bit and add some inline HTML to add some bold and italic text.

And here's how the popup looks now. A nice little improvement.

Want to show a photo in the popup? It's easy. Just enter the path to the photo.

And here's the photo displayed in the poup.

But remember that local paths are not accessible to others if you want to share your note or map. You could put the photo on a common location that's accessible to others within your company, but a Web location that anybody can access might be a better approach. Here's the same photo, but now it's been published from the ESRI Web site. Instead of a pathname we're using the URL to display the photo in the popup. Since the URL is public, everyone will see the same popup contents if we share our note or map.

And here's how it looks. It's a large photo, and one taken of the new ESRI HQ building here on campus.

Likewise we can enter a URL if we want to open a Web site in the popup. Here we've entered the URL to the ESRI home page.

And here's the Web page opened in the popup.

Now, let's put all these together. When you enter a string in the popup ArcGIS Explorer does its best to figure out what to do with it. If just text, it will display the text. If a path or URL, it will display the target. But to create a popup that includes a little bit of everything, we'll need to use a little HTML.

Here's the HTML to display both formatted and non-formatted text strings (like in our first two examples above), a picture from a local source (the third example), and links to a Web site and photo on the Web (the last two examples).

Here's how our popup looks now:

Doing interesting things in popups is easy. Just experiment with a little HTML.

For more information see the HTML markup for notes Help topic.

Adding animations to your map with notes

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:48:00 GMT

In an earlier post we looked at how you can add live Web cams to your map using the live Old Faithful cam at Yellowstone National Park. Continuing with that theme, let's look at how we can add some of the animated media found at the Park Web site to our map.

First, let's zoom to the boundary around Yellowstone National Park. We found the boundary for Yellowstone National Park at the NPS Data clearinghouse and downloaded it as a shapefile. Then added it to our

We added a point note, placing it in the middle of the Park. The note popup automatically opens in edit mode, and we've already changed the title.

Now let's go to the Yellowstone Web site. We found a link on the left of the main page titled Nature & Science which we followed, eventually taking us to the hotspot page with hot spot theories and some really spiffy flash animations.

All we need to do is copy the URL of this page and paste it in our note.

That was easy, and worked out great. And here's how it looks.

But what we wanted was just the animation. The Park site doesn't provide a direct link, so in this case it's a little more of challenge to grab just the Flash animation. So we had to do a little investigation and use a little HTML and Web site knowledge. Here's how we figured it out.

First we right-clicked on the page to view it's source, and found the spot in the document where the flash animation is referenced. It was in the midst of another set of code to launch the flash player, and here is what that looked like.

Now the path, highlighted in yellow above, is relative, so we had to figure out what the public URL would be to the animation. Looking at the URL to the main Park site, we could figure it out pretty easily. Here is the URL to the main page.

So we just added the root of the URL above to the relative path in the URL we found in the page code.

Then we just pasted everthing including the EMBED tags into our note.

And here's the final result - just what we wanted, just the Flash animation in our popup.

It's easy to use HTML in popups to do very interesting things.

Adding photos to your map using notes

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 16:53:00 GMT

Notes are an easy way to add a wide variety of non-GIS content to your map, like photos, videos, Web pages, PDF files, and more. Using notes you can place any of these in a geographic context, and use them with other layers in your map and in presentations. Here we'll take a look at how to use notes to add photos to your map.

The other weekend we were up in the Sierra Nevada range, near a peak named Chocolate Peak, and took a GPS reading and some photos. One option would be to place a point note interactively by clicking the map at the desired location of where we want to place the photo. But since we took a GPS reading, let's use the GPS location to place it. Here's the steps.

Use Find and enter the GPS coordinates

Once the location has been entered, you'll see a pushpin on the map. Right click to move the location to your map contents. When you do it becomes a note.

Here's the note in our contents.

Next we'll click the note title to change it. We could also change this when editing the popup window as you'll see below, but we'll take care of this here.

Our next step is to edit the popup window contents and add the path to our photo. There are a variety of ways to open the popup window. We could click the note pushpin on the map, or can right-click the note in our contents and choose Show Popup.

And another way is by using the contextual tabs which apear in the ribbon. Click Popup Content to open the popup window directly in edit mode.

Once the popup window is open, we want to make sure we're in edit mode by clicking in the lower right corner of the popup window.

All we need to do now is add the path to our photo. We can also edit the title again if we want to.

The path can also be a URL, and using public URL locations is a good way to make sure that users we share our map or note with can also see our photo in the popup. Obviously if we use a local path on our laptop another user may not be able to see the photo in the popup. If we use a more widely accessible network location or public URL, then any user can view our photo.

And we can even E-mail our note directly from the popup window to share it with others.

You can get more information about notes by viewing the following Help topics:

Mount Redoubt redux

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 02:26:00 GMT

Recently Alaska's Mount Redoubt made the news with a spectacular eruption. According to Wikipedia:

Mount Redoubt, or Redoubt Volcano, is an active and currently erupting stratovolcano in the largely volcanic Aleutian Range of the U.S. state of Alaska. It is located in the Chigmit Mountains (a subrange of the Aleutians), west of Cook Inlet, in the Kenai Peninsula Borough about 180 km (110 miles) southwest of Anchorage.

We thought we'd take a closer look at the volcano, and indeed we showcased a bit of Mount Redobut during the recent DevSummit plenary using the soon-to-be-beta ArcGIS Explorer 900. You'll see it displayed in 900's presentation mode at the end of a post we published about the plenary demo. But 900 isn't released yet, so we thought we'd take another look at it using the current 500 version of ArcGIS Explorer.

First, we needed to locate Mount Redobut. To do that we used the GeoNames Search task which you can add to ArcGIS Explorer (if you've not done so already) from the Tasks tab on the Explorer Resource Center. Click the description of the task and you'll learn that:

Searches the GeoNames (geonames.org) geographical database. It returns geo-referenced candidates from you can create results or simply navigate to. The database contains over eight million geographical names and consists of 6.5 million unique features whereof 2.2 million populated places and 1.8 million alternate names.

This task is ideal for finding place names such as mountain peaks, valleys, and other placenames you might see on topo maps. So we entered Mount Redoubt and found... well... not quite what we were looking for. We found Mount Redoubt in Washington. We then typed Redoubt Volcano and located it. We chose Create Result to add it to our map.

Turning on the topographic map layer we figured out why - the placename on the topo is indeed Redoubt Volcano, so that's the way it's stored in the GeoNames database. Here's the location on the topo map, and we've clicked to open its popup window. The information in the popup was automatically created when we used the task.

We were cruising around on the Web and found this nifty flash animation on the MSNBC site.

Viewing the source for the page we were able to figure out the flash animation source. We edited the popup properties to add the flash animation to our popup window, and here's what it looked like. The neat part is that we could use the back and next arrows within the animation to move from one animation frame to another.

And here's the HTML we typed into the popup window properties to display the animation.

While we don't advocate "stealing" content from anyone's Web site (we just borrowed this), you can experiment with lots of things in popup windows that you can discover on the Web. You might need a little HTML know-how, but it's super simple to add some compelling content to your popups.

Exploring Antarctica

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 18:44:00 GMT

Here's an interesting post that just appeared on the GIS Education Community Blog from George Dailey, ESRI Education Manager. It covers a trip by a colleague (Robyn Johnson) to Antarctica, and uses Explorer to tell the story about the adventure. It uses several tasks and incorporates the ArcGIS Online basemaps with data from NOAA, and also incorporates Robyn's blog entries and YouTube vids using notes and their popups.

To learn more about notes and what you can do with them, check out these previous posts:

Tutorial: All About Notes

New Streaming Video: Creating and Using Notes

Tutorial: Putting YouTube in Your Notes

Adding Photos and More to Note Popups

Happy Holidays from the ArcGIS Explorer Team

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 17:02:00 GMT

The ArcGIS Explorer Team would like to send you our Season's Greetings in the form of a screenshot showing a snowy Yosemite landscape via a live Web cam seen from within Explorer. We managed to capture the sunset glow at the top of Half Dome the other day.

We'd like to pause for a moment to thank everyone for helping make it such a great year. The coming year holds much more for ArcGIS Explorer, and we're looking forward to the release of ArcGIS Explorer 900. As usual we'll be filling you in on what's new here on the blog.

Season's Greetings!

- the ArcGIS Explorer Team

The image above was made by using note results that link to live Yosemite Web cams and a display overlay map property. For more info and ideas on creating notes that link to Web cams and other content, see these posts:

Adding Photos and More to Note Popups (April 7, 2008)

Exploring the Collapse of Wall Arch (August 12, 2008)

ESRI User Conference 2008 - Plenary Part I (August 4, 2008)

For more info on display overlays, see this post:

Display overlay, legends, and streamlining the user experience (October 6, 2008)

Results on the ArcGIS Explorer Resource Center

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 22:55:00 GMT

We've covered note results quite a bit here on the blog; they're very useful and can integrate all sorts of different content on your map. Here's a couple of blog posts to check out if you've not done so already:

Creating and Using Notes

Adding Photos and More to Note Popups

The ArcGIS Explorer Resource Center also has a collection of results you can click and access directly. All of these are authored using the various methods covered in the blog posts listed above. Two found on the Resource Center that we took a closer look at in this video are the US Highest and Lowest Points, and NPS Air Quality. Check out the video:

New Streaming Video: Creating and Using Notes

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:20:00 GMT

A new streaming video showing some of the things you can do with notes is now available. The video was produced by Jim Barry, Program Manager for the ESRI Developer Network, and shows Explorer team member Bernie Szukalski working through some note examples.

View the video

You may also want to check out some of the previous blog posts on notes.

Adding Photos and More to Note Popups

Liven Up Explorer with Live Content

And you can review the creating notes Help topic for additional information.

Adding Photos and More to Note Popups

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 00:21:00 GMT

We've recently had a few questions about adding photos, links to Web sites, and more to a note popup window. Here's a primer on how that's done. But before we get to the "photos and more" part, let's start at the beginning...

We've navigated to Mt. Shasta, California, where we'd like to add a note. To create a note, just choose the Create Notes task. We've changed the note title to "Mt. Shasta" and added a short description - "Mt. Shasta, California - 14,179 feet" - as the note text.

When you hover over the note pushpin, you'll see the note title display. When you click the note pushpin, you'll see something like this:

Let's take this one step further and replace the text with a locally stored photo on our C: drive. Right click the Mt. Shasta note in the results panel, or right click the note pushpin on the map, and choose properties.

Below you can see that we've changed the popup content from our original text (Mt. Shasta, California - 14,179 feet) to the pathname to the file: C:\AGX\Photos\shasta_usgs.jpg.

When we click the note pushpin again, we see something like this:

The USGS publishes photos of Mt. Shasta from their Web site, so we can substitute the local photo with one that's available on the Web. The advantage here is that anyone we send the note to can click the pushpin and see the photo since it's a publicly accessible photo rather than one stored on the local C: drive, which nobody else can access.

All we need to do is replace the local file path in the Popup Text property with the URL location of the photo at the USGS Web site: http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Imgs/Jpg/Shasta/Images/Shasta05_aerial_mount_shasta_shastina_from_west_12-10-05_med.jpg

The note popup will look the same as before, but this time the content is Web-based and shareable rather than a local file. To share this with someone, just right click the note and choose export result.

The NMF file you save can be emailed to anyone, and they'll see the same thing you do since the result is linking to publicly available content.

We can extend the popup contents by using HTML. The HTML isn't required if we just want to display text or a single link to a local file or URL like we've done above. But we can use it to add additional content or format the popup contents. Here we're adding a note that will include a title in bold text to our USGS photo:

And now the popup should look something like this:

And now to the "more" part of this post. Here's the HTML you can use to popup a photo of a bird, and also play the sound of its call.

The use of hidden in the embed tag ensures that the program that plays the sound remains invisible.

You can be as creative as you want. For more information visit the HTML markup for notes, results, and files topic found in the ArcGIS Explorer Help.

Build 410 Updates for Notes and Import File...

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 00:48:00 GMT

In a previous post on notes, we talked about how you can include Web resources in the note text. One of the nice enhancements in Build 410 is that the use of HTML tags is no longer required, all you need to do is add the URL to whatever you want to appear in the note popup. Here's what the note looks like now:

Another nice enhancement in Build 410 is that the note popup sizes automatically, so if you link to a Web resource or other resource, like a photo, video, or other page, Explorer will auto-resize the popup window.

We also covered importing text files with Web links in an earlier post, but here, too, the HTML tags are no longer required and the popups will attempt to auto-resize. Here's what our text file looks like now:

Name, Latitude, Longitude, Link
Mount Rainier, 46.852947, -121.760424, http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/Imgs/Jpg/Rainier/30410142-011_med.jpg

and here's the result.

Liven Up Explorer with Live Content

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 01:16:00 GMT

Labor Day Weekend is approaching, there's a heat wave in southern California, and clouds and even some raindrops seem to be all around. A likely escape for a long weekend getaway is one of the nearby National Parks, perhaps Yosemite. But what about the weather?

Here's a quick little mashup of a couple of different services, showing real-time weather published by the Pennsylvania State University through the Pennsylvania Spatial Data Access site, along with live Web cam feeds from Yosemite National Park.

The weather is an ArcIMS service, and when we opened it in Explorer we set the service to update every 15 minutes, so we'd be seeing the latest weather conditions at regular intervals since late summer storms move quickly through the Sierra.

The Yosemite Web cams are published at the Yosemite Association Web site. We created several notes (using the Create Notes task) and entered the URL to the Web cams in the note text box.

Unfortunately the Web site didn't publish the exact coordinates for the cams, but it did describe their locations. We added the Physical Features layer from the new Resource Center to our map, since it includes the 1:24000 scale topo maps for the US. We used the cam placement descriptions and the topo maps to locate each Web cam push pin. The cams are not at their exact physical locations, but close enough for our needs.

Finally, to organize things, we used the new Add Folder capabilities for results to group all of them under one "Yosemite Online" note. We also added links to the note that point to the National Park Service and Yosemite Association Web sites.

We've exported the note, and emailed it around to everyone on the team so they could open and see the same live cams and weather information in Explorer.

Tutorial: All About Notes

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 21:46:00 GMT

ArcGIS Explorer's Notes are an easy way to add pushpins to your maps, and also offer unique capabilities to link to a variety of content, including local files as well as anything that's published on the Web. Here's a quickie tutorial on the topic that covers the whole gamut of possibilities

The Basic Note
Here's an example of a simple Note:

Just click the Create Notes task and type what you see above. Zoom to the ESRI campus (by using the Find Address task and entering 380 New York Street, Redlands, CA) and use the Point tool to place the note. After you add the note you can click the pushpin and you'll see something like this:

Adding Links to a Note
The above is a very basic example, but there's a lot more that you can do with notes. One nice feature is that you can link multiple documents easily to the same note. These can be documents on your local drive or on your network, or can be Web links. Next we'll add a link to the ESRI Web site and attach it to the note we've just created. In the Results Window where your note resides, right-click the note and choose Add a link to File...

In the Select a File to Link To dialog box, you can select the path to a file or document that is located on your local drive, your network, or you can type a URL to create a link to a Web site. Enter http://www.esri.com in the Filename input box and you'll see that you've added a new item under your note. When you click the item it will, of course, open the ESRI web site. You can add multiple links, and combine all sorts of different document types and Web links.

Opening a Web site in the Note Popup
Now let's try a different approach to adding a link to a Web site. In this next example we want to open the site automatically when the user clicks the note pushpin. To do this we can use the note text, but instead of entering plain text as we did above we will enter an HTML statement as follows:

Place the note somewhere on the map and click the pushpin. The popup window will appear, displaying the Web site automatically.

Playing a Movie in the Note Popup
Now let's do something a little different. Instead of linking to a Web site from a note, let's link to an online movie. The movie that we'll link to is one about ArcGIS Explorer published on the ESRI Web site. The direct URL to the movie is: http://www.esri.com/flashmedia/arcgisexplorer/arcgisexplorer.html

To play the movie directly from a note we just add the appropriate HTML. This is very similar to the previous example except that we have substituted the URL pointing to the movie after "url=" appears in the note text.

You can save this text out somewhere handy, and just copy and paste it into your note text when needed, making specific changes to what is inserted after "url="

Now when we click the note the Flash movie will start playing in the popup. You may have to give it a second or two to begin streaming from the ESRI Web site.

And don't forget that you can export your note as an NMF file and email it to others, put it up on your Sharepoint site, etc. But remember that whomever you send your note to must be able to access whatever files or links you've included with it.

A Note about Notes in the next Explorer Release
The next release of ArcGIS Explorer, scheduled to be released in July, has some really nice enhancements and additions to note functionality. You may have seen us demonstrate some of these at the User Conference. These include:

Notes can be grouped, renamed, and reorganized
The view position, extent, and perspective can be captured as a note property
Entering HTML (as we did above) is no longer required, all you need to do is type the URL to the Web resource you want to open
Popup windows will automatically resize on open
And more...

We'll be covering some of these new capabilities in more detail in future posts.