Open Voyager Search Results With Geocortex Viewer

Owned by Cooper Labenske
Last updated: Apr 14, 2022

This article describes how to configure Voyager to allow service-based search results to be previewed in your organization's Geocortex Viewer for Silverlight (GVS).

Voyager and Geocortex 

Geocortex Essentials from Latitude Geographics allows users to build rich, functional web-mapping applications largely through configuration instead of custom code. You can learn more about Geocortex and Latitude at http://www.latitudegeo.com.

Voyager Search enjoys a partnership with Latitude Geographics which combines the strengths of both applications:

  • Voyager's Enterprise Search functionality is enabled in Geocortex Essentials REST Manager and Viewers when users are looking for layers to add to their Applications

  • Voyager users can use a Geocortex Site URL as a source for data discovery and may also use Geocortex Viewers to preview results from their Voyager searches.

Configuring Voyager Search in Geocortex is enabled through a plug-in, discussed in more detail here and on the Geocortex Extensions page.

Configuring Voyager to index content from a Geocortex Essentials site is described in the here.

Configuration

Configuration involves these steps:

  1. Registering a Geocortex workflow file (sample file) with your site in Essentials REST Manager

  2. Configuring the workflow to run automatically at startup

  3. Adding a Geocortex Silverlight viewer to your Essentials site

  4. Configuring Voyager Navigo to direct Open With requests to the Geocortex Viewer

  5. Restarting Voyager Search

Registering a Geocortex Workflow 

  1. Save the sample workflow file LoadLayers.xaml (attached) to a location visible to sites in your Geocortex Essentials server

  2. Add / register the workflow with your site

Configuring the Workflow to Run Automatically 

Make sure that Run on Startup is checked when you first add or subsequently edit the workflow’s configurations.

 

You’ll notice that this workflow takes an input argument called strURL. This is an external argument that the workflow is able to retrieve from the Geocortex viewer’s launch URL. In the following section, we’ll demonstrate how to append this to viewer launch requests.

 

Finish this process and Save your site.

Adding a Geocortex Silverlight Viewer

Add a Silverlight viewer to your Essentials site.  See the Geocortex documentation for more information. The only situation in which you’d want to override the following settings (to use the parent Site configurations) is if you had several viewers registered with your site and didn’t want them all to run the Load Layers workflow at startup.

 

Configuring Voyager Navigo

  1. On the Voyager server, use Windows Explorer to navigate to the Voyager install directory

  2. Browse to the app/web/navigo sub-folder

  3. Open the file config.js in your preferred text editor / IDE

  4. Locate the block of code that defines the docActions: [ … ] (Tools Menu) options (~line 35 by default). Add the following lines of code:

  text:'Open in Geocortex', action:'open', visible:'isService', param:'strURL', url:'http://odn.voyagersearch.com/GVS/Viewer.html?ViewerConfig=http://voyagerdemo.com/Geocortex/Essentials/REST/sites/VoyagerDemo/viewers/GVS/virtualdirectory/Config/Viewer.xml' }

Notes

  • Line-breaks have been added for clarity.

  • Your URL value (including ViewerConfig URL) will be specific to your Geocortex implementation.

  • This is a JSON object in the docActions[ ... ] array - Add a trailing comma if it is NOT the last item.

Parameters:

  • text: Controls the text that is visible in the Voyager Tools Menu for this option.

  • action: Signifies the back-end handler that selecting this option in the Tools Menu invokes.

  • visible: Controls the documents for which this option is visible - It is applied to Map Services.

  • param: the name of the parameter used in the back-end URL builder (the workflow’s strURL input)

  • url: the value of the parameter used in the back-end URL builder (value passed in for strURL input)

Where you place this line in your docActions[ ... ] array is important. Lines that meet the criteria for appearance are shown in the order in which they occur in this block.

Restart Voyager Search (service / process) for your changes to appear.

Usage Notes

  1. Locate a service-based record in your Voyager catalog on the Home page, Results page (Card, List or Map view) or Details page

  2. Select Open With Geocortex from the item's Tools menu

 

This should launch a GVS instance that, once loaded, automatically adds the requested layer to the viewer's layer list and displays that layer on the map.