Chapter 6. Building a desktop browser application
This chapter covers
- Building a browser-based web application for the desktop
- Implementing security, tokens, and OAuth 2.0
- Saving security credentials
- Working with more out-of-the-box widgets
- Editing collected data
- Linking collected data with other data
Chapter 5 covered the details of custom editing and using the built-in capabilities of the ArcGIS JavaScript API to build an easy-to-use mobile editing application. The focus was on designing the application to run on mobile devices efficiently. Yet there is still a need for browser-based web applications for use in a desktop environment. Rather than investing in a desktop GIS application, such as ArcMap, which requires additional licenses for each user and comes with features that many users don’t need, you can create a focused web application that meets the specific needs of users. Implementing a web application designed for the desktop also saves time and money otherwise spent training people to use a new GIS application.
In this chapter, we consider the needs and goals of a desktop browser application built with the ArcGIS API for JavaScript. You’ll use some new Dijits that we haven’t yet discussed, and we’ll cover how to make updates or corrections to the data that was collected in the field.
Let’s start with the goals of the application, which we’ll name the RequestViewer.