Geoportal Clients for ArcGIS
Overview
There are a number of ways for users to connect to a geoportal and search. Besides the geoportal web application itself, a number of other search clients are outlined in the two following sections: Geoportal Clients for ArcGIS Desktop and Introduction to Geoportal Widgets. These search clients are a few of many possible ways to integrate your organization's geoportal into user workflows.
Geoportal Clients for ArcGIS Desktop
There are two client tools that can be used with ArcGIS Desktop to connect to the geoportal. They are the CSW Clients and Publish Client. They ship with the Geoportal extension installation media and are also available for free download from the Geoportal extension resource center.
A third client - the WMC Client - currently ships with the Geoportal extension, and is also available at the Geoportal extension resource center. The WMC Client does not connect to the geoportal directly, but can be used to open web map context files in ArcMap.
To install and use the Geoportal Clients for ArcGIS Desktop, see the sections below:
Note: ArcGIS Desktop .NET Support must be enabled during installation of ArcGIS Desktop on any machine that will be using the Geoportal extension Clients. The screenshot below shows enabling .Net Support during installation of ArcGIS Desktop: |
Introduction to Geoportal Widgets
Geoportal widgets are simple applications that allow users to search your geoportal from a customized html page, a Flex-based viewer, a Silverlight viewer, and other venues. ESRI provides these widgets and samples for how they can be implemented in an examples page accessible from the geoportal web application interface. The widgets leverage the geoportal's search and display functionality from a custom HTML page, Flex-based viewer, or Silverlight-based viewer. This allows users to search for resources, view their metadata, read the details, and use live services.
The three Geoportal Search Widgets provided out-of-the-box are further described in the following sections:
- Geoportal Search Widget for HTML
- Geoportal Search Widget for Flex
- Geoportal Search Widget for Silverlight
To access the examples page for the Geoportal Search Widgets, type the following url into a browser, replacing "server_name" with the name of your geoportal's server:
http://server_name/geoportal/widgets/example.jsp