This is obviously the first beta, and a closed beta at that, of the new Flex API so you expect a few rough edges. One of those is error handling. There are a few places where I would expect no error to be thrown but they are anyway, if a layer’s url property is set to an empty string then the next pan/zoom will throw an error, and a few places where you would like an error to be thrown to let you know something is wrong and it isn’t. The main place I can think of is when a tiling service fails you have no way of knowing this which caused some of the people here issues. I have no doubt these will be fixed going forward.
Authentication
There is no support currently for secured services. If you want to use one you must first add it to an mxd and then expose it as an unsecured map service in Arc Server. I did this with an IMS weather service and it worked just fine. This is something that will be added but hasn’t crept to the top of the development team’s list yet.
Slow/Dead Services
There are issues with services which are either slow to respond or have died. When a zoom occurs and a service doesn’t respond correctly the area on the screen which is coming from that service will behave weirdly, growing or shrinking out of proportion with the rest of the map. This caused a small set of data in Montgomery to eventually cover the entire South East US for me when I tested it by stopping the map service completely. In the case of extremely slow services this will eventually correct itself but it may take several minutes. This is something the team was working on fixing as the day progressed and may even now be dealt with.
Layering Services
Layering multiple services is now much smoother than it was with the old api. When you drop services on top of one another they now automatically leave the area not covered by their features transparent. This means that if I put a map service with gas mains on top of a service showing street data I can automatically see all of the data. This is a nice improvement from the past when you had to set transparency colors etc. to get this effect.
No More IMouseHandler!!
The IMouseHandler interface is gone with the wind. This made me sad mainly because we have created a number of mouse handlers to do various tasks for us. After talking it over with the development team however it seems there will be a new paradigm called Toolkits which will allow the same type of behavior along with (hopefully) even more flexibility...no pun intended.
TOC Control
One of the first tests I did was to recreate the table of contents control I had made with the old api. This is now much more straight forward. LayerInfo objects now come along with your layer when it is received from the rest api. This means you can immediately cycle through all of the layers, drop them in a VBox as checkboxes, and correctly check/uncheck them based upon the default visibility property. I was very pleased with the TOC control in both performance and ease of coding. The only issue that I saw was when switching the URL of my background layer there would be a flicker as the background turned momentarily white. I didn’t even notice it at first but when the Product Lead was watching me show the TOC control he commented on it. I’m not sure if this will get fixed to not redraw the background layer until the new source comes through but that would be a nice little adjustment.
Tips:
Use
Whenever you change the underlying map document for a map service be ready to also clear the REST cache. You can find the REST manager by going to http://servername/ArcGIS/rest/admin where the only option is currently to clear the cache or setup a schedule for it to be cleared. If you don’t do this and the api has already been used to get information on that map service then you will get some strange inconsistencies.
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