With our latest project (Asset Editor) we came up with a number of challenges to overcome in order to deliver a successful application. Probably the biggest challenge was the integration of a live map using the client’s ArcGIS.
Normally the implementation of a view of ArcGIS in Chrome or IE is simple given the excellent API supplied by Esri, however we needed to have this view within an application rather than a web browser. In the past we used Microsoft’s WebBrowser control, but given the restrictions in place on the client’s device and the restrictions on the API for ArcGIS, we needed to look at another solution. To achieve this we looked at CEF and CefSharp which can be used without installation and comes with a fantastic set of DevTools amongst other benefits (speed etc…). Implementation of CEF wasn’t necessarily straight forward, but after creating some test apps to prove that the concept would work, we were able to create the same framework that we would normally have created using the old WebBrowser control. The support for Javascript integration is great and really easy to implement and allowed us to nicely integrate the control into our code and provide the necessary couplings between web browser, ArcGIS and the back end.
