Hello everybody,
I am staring to use Map Suite for Silverlight trial version and I have a very basic question about the Map Suite product.
Till now I couldn't find anything for administrating the maps. As far as it looks for me now, there isn't one, and all the configurations that's done in ESRI products using ArcMap and ArcCatalog (projecting layers to different spatial references, changing it's styles, etc.) is done entirely through code in runtime.
Could that be true?
Thanks!
Maxim
Hi Maxim,
Thanks for trial our product. First of all, our Silverlight product is a Silverlight control which can use for re-producing another control and also you can use for developing your new application as well. For Silverlight is different from ArcMap or ArcCatalog which is local map utility. It’s simular like our desktop explorer. It cannot be designed on the design time for its rendering logic is actually on the server side which means the images cannot be seen before the server side is started. Please run our installed sample to know how our Silverlight works. Hope it makes sense.
Thanks,
Howard
Hi Howard,
Thanks for you response. But the problem is that my users want to be able to configure their map’s style in production at any time. With ESRI’s products I can just open the .mxd file in ArcMap, show it to the user and let him play with it as much as he wants. After he is finished I would just distribute the new mxd to the production servers and that would be it.
How do I accomplish the same thing with Map Suite products?
Thanks!
Maxim,
As your description, it’s seems like that you want to have an editor with a default map displays on the panel. It allows editing styles and some vectors by it. Then serialize these configuration to binary and save it to a file. When loading this file back, the editor deserialize the binary and load the configuration back to display the map with the new style again.
Please confirm me with the requirement.
Thanks,
Howard
Hi Howard,
Yes, something like that. It doesn't have to be binary, it could be xml. I want to be able to create/edit it in some desktop application and then load it to my map control in Silvelight, for example.
Because I don't see a point in configuring all the styles of all the dozens of my static map layers in cod in run time. It's nice as something extra to give to a programmer but most of such work, in my opinion, should happend in design time. I am sure you remember the tremendous possibilities of line/polygon/text/point/labeling styling the ArcMap has to offer for such a scenario. So, I would be glad if something like that existed in Map Suite.
Maxim
Maxim,
Unfortunately, some of the classes doesn’t support xml formater in our web, desktop or service edition; while Silverlight library is a functional subset of these libraries so that it doesn’t support xml formater; and some classes is not supported for binary format. Your idea is such a good suggestion and requirement. Currently, we don’t have a feature to do this; but I think we can have it in our issue list and enhance it in the future.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
Thanks,
Howard