ArcGIS Explorer Blog : Popup

A Web cam view of fine cuisine on the ESRI campus

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 21:08:00 GMT

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.

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.

PDFs in Popups

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 17:02:00 GMT

Recently we had a question about whether or not it was possible to open a PDF file directly in a result popup, and the answer is - Yes.

In this particular case the user wanted to open a local PDF file in the popup, which is easy to do. But that also means that others would also need to have access to that local folder to see the PDF appear in the popup. In a corporate network this is easy enough to do by places these out on a shared network location. But another way to provide broad accessibility extermal to your organization is to publish them from your server and use a URL in the popup content. Let's take a look at how this is done.

Here we've used the Find Address task to create a result, in this case it's the location of ESRI's Redlands campus. Opening the result properties you'll see the popup content is currently the address we used.

Now let's change that to open a PDF file, in this case a PDF document on our C: drive. Just enter the complete path for the PDF, but remember that other users will not be able to view the PDF since it's in a local location.

Here we've improved our accessibility by pointing to a PDF published from a server, in this case it's a PDF document published on the esri.com Web site.

In all cases, this is what you'll see in Explorer

As you can see it's easy to do, and you can popup other types of documents, media, and URLs. We've covered some of these in a previous post.

Click here to view the result and open its properties to see how it's been done.

For more information view the Result Properties Help topic.

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.

Launching a Browser via Popup Links

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 04:30:00 GMT

One of the changes to results in Explorer 440 is that links within the result popup will open a new browser window, rather that open within the popup itself. This allows you to use the browser's navigation tools, and other tools you may have in your browser, in conjunction with result popups.

First, let's create a result. For this example we'll do this by using the Find Address task, but you can create results in many other ways. Type an address to create a result, we'll use our favorite 380 New York Street, Redlands, CA:

Click on the result to open its popup. You'll see something like this:

Now right-click the result and choose properties, and take a look at the Popup Content. You'll see the address plus some HTML tags which together create the popup content you saw when you clicked the result.

Let change the Popup Content to include a link to an external Web site, in our example we will use the ESRI web site. We begin by adding the starting HTML tag to the first line of the Popup Content. This isn't required at this latest release, but is good practice, and ensures that even those that haven't updated to the latest Explorer will also see your popup contents as intended. We'll add an extra line break after the address, then add the link, and close the html tag as shown below:

When you open the popup, you'll now see a link, and when you click the link it will open a new browser window.

For more information refer to the Help topics on Results Window item properties and HTML markup for notes, results, and files.

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.