When we introduced Saved Filters, we were excited to be able to provide customers with a secure and easy way to share a scoped data feed outside of the Fulcrum platform. Live links to CSV, JSON, and GeoJSON feeds allow external applications to connect directly to the data, enabling things like linked spreadsheets and integrated Business Intelligence tools.

With support for common open data formats implemented, we’ve recently been focusing our resources on the geospatial community. For some customers, Fulcrum provides an introduction to geospatial data, with the ability to view automatically geotagged records as locations on a map. For others, Fulcrum represents one of many tools in their advanced Geographic Information Systems (GIS) arsenal- and when it comes to GIS, Esri is the industry powerhouse.

Fulcrum’s implementation of Esri’s Feature Service represents a major step toward better interoperability between the two platforms. Feature Services allow applications to intelligently serve features over the internet and provide the symbology to use when displaying the features.

What this means for users is that it’s now easier than ever to directly plug your Fulcrum data into the Esri suite of applications, including:

Any Fulcrum view that is explicitly shared (not private) now implements an Esri Feature Service endpoint with a single Feature Layer, representing the view’s records. This read-only layer can be queried directly, referenced in a web map, or added to desktop GIS.

Since Feature Layers can be queried with a wide variety of parameters, and the results returned in a variety of formats and spatial references, they are much more sophisticated than our other output formats, enabling exciting new opportunities to integrate with powerful GIS applications.

Let’s take a look at some examples of how you can leverage this new capability!

The ArcGIS Online Map Viewer provides a quick and easy way for you to create, share, and interact with online maps. You can view your data directly in AGOL by providing the Feature Layer URL in the Map Viewer url parameter like so:

https://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?url=https://fulcrumapp.io/share/aaecda06b8d5c440dabc/geoservices/FeatureServer/0

The example above displays data from a building damage assessment collected with Fulcrum by Santa Barbara County following the Whitier & Alamo fires in 2017.

Map Viewer functionality is limited if you are not signed in, but ArcGIS Online can be used for free with a noncommercial public account. The free public account lets you create, store, and manage maps, scenes, and apps, and share them with others. You also get access to content shared by Esri and GIS users around the world. Once logged in, you can customize the map symbology, info pop-ups, and more. Your configuration can then be saved, and the map shared publicly and/or embedded in your website.

You can also add the map layer to your ArcGIS Pro.

The ArcGIS JS API provides developers with the resources needed to build custom web maps and analytics apps. You can pull in a Feature Layer from Fulcrum with just a few lines of code:

See the Pen by Bryan McBride.