GEOG 863:
Web Application Development for Geospatial Professionals

Summary and Final Tasks

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Summary and Final Tasks

In Lesson 7, you learned how to add place-finding capability to an app through the use of locator services and the Search widget. You also saw how that widget can be used to search for values in layer attribute tables. Finally, you looked at the use of the Query class in defining queries (spatial, non-spatial, or both at once) and how Query objects can be used as inputs to methods that return feature counts, feature IDs, or the features themselves. Importantly, you learned how promises play a prominent role in handling the results of asynchronous operations both in geospatial and more generic JavaScript applications.

One last note on the topic of queries: in looking at the SDK or the source code of other apps, you may come across a class called QueryTask. This class was used in earlier versions of Esri's API to execute queries defined in Query objects. While queries can still be executed using a QueryTask, you should note that the QueryTask class supports only layers derived from ArcGIS Server services (i.e., it does not support ArcGIS Online layers).

One aspect of this lesson that you may have found dissatisfying was that the queries were all hard coded into the apps. There was no way for users to supply their own query parameters as we're all used to seeing in more sophisticated apps. The good news is that Lesson 8 is all about UI development. With the knowledge you'll gain from that lesson combined with what you learned here in Lesson 7, you should be well on your way to developing your own killer apps. smiley