Introduction to Geocortex Essentials

Geocortex® Essentials is a framework for designing, developing, and maintaining web mapping applications. Engineered from the ground up to work with Esri™ ArcGIS™ technology, Essentials extends the ArcGIS platform with the addition of a number of powerful features for building real-world GIS applications:

• Workflows: Workflows provide a quick way to program complex, interactive, GIS and business procedures. Essentials Workflow Designer's drag-and-drop interface, library of activities, and built-in simulator accelerate development and free the programmer from handling low-level details like client-server communications. 

• Instant Search: Instant Search is a very fast, indexed search engine that enables users to search for attributes from multiple map services and feature services. Instant Search provides search suggestions to users as they type. The search results are sorted by relevance and search results are plotted on the map instantly.

• Data Linking: Data linking provides the ability to retrieve non-spatial data from external data sources such as databases and spreadsheets, and link the external data to attributes of spatial data.

• Reporting: Template-based reporting allows the user to generate reports based on templates configured by an administrator. Each template defines a standard layout for reporting on a layer's features, attributes, and data (both linked and computed).

• Printing: Configured by the administrator, print templates enable the user to create printable maps, including large-format output, using standard layouts.

• Charting: Charting enables users to view graphs of attribute data. Essentials supports bar charts, pie charts, and a variety of line charts. Charts update dynamically depending on the features that the user has selected.

Sites and Viewers

As an administrator of Geocortex Essentials, you will configure sites and viewers. A site defines the configuration of a map and the components that work with the map. Viewers are the web applications that enable users to view and interact with a site's map.

Essentials ships with a web-based tool for creating and configuring sites, Geocortex Essentials Manager. In addition, Essentials provides a viewer framework that enables you to create fully functioning map viewers with a few clicks, the Geocortex Viewer for HTML5. Viewers created using the HTML5 Viewer framework are implemented in HTML5, JavaScript™, and TypeScript. HTML5 viewers can run in a browser, or they can run as a native iOS, Android™, or Windows™ application in the Geocortex Mobile App Framework.

Geocortex Essentials and Esri ArcGIS

Geocortex Essentials is engineered to work with Esri ArcGIS technology. Essentials supports:

• ArcGIS Server Services: Public or private ArcGIS Server map services, feature layers, images services, geocoding services, and geometry services.

• Public ArcGIS Online Content: Public web maps, map services, and feature layers that are available at ArcGIS Online (www.arcgis.com).

• Private ArcGIS Online Content: Private web maps, map services, and feature layers that are hosted by ArcGIS Online.

• ArcGIS Online World Geocoding Service: The geocoding service at:

  http://geocode.arcgis.com/arcgis/rest/services/World/GeocodeServer

• Portal for ArcGIS Web Maps: Public and private web maps that are hosted in your Portal for ArcGIS portal.