Using Esri UK’s Online Gazetteer Services in LocalView Fusion

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On our Online Operations sister blog, we have added details about three new online gazetteer services available to users of Esri UK’s free online services. While we hope that these are of use to our customers across the Esri platform, I wanted to let LocalView Fusion users know that ArcGIS Locators will not work with LocalView Fusion. They will work in other areas of the ArcGIS platform e.g. ArcGIS for Desktop, ArcGIS Online etc.

As some background, the three new gazetteers are ArcGIS Locators. There are already two existing locators in our Online Services, and these are based on LocatorHub. LocalView Fusion users can continue to use the LocatorHub based ones.

Because we now have two different types of gazetteers, each supporting the same free OS data, I wanted to highlight the areas in LocalView Fusion where you will see these as options you can configure for use, to make sure they are not used in error.

In the Admin menu > Esri UK Services, you will see them when you configure your Online Service Account e.g. 

All locators will appear in the available list.  The existing LocatorHub based locators are the ones named

  • Ordnance Survey CodePoint Open
  • Ordnance Survey Locator (*be careful*) 

The new ArcGIS Locator locators are the ones named

  • OS CodePointOpen Postcode Locator
  • OS Locator Locator
  • OS 50K Placename Locator

Our naming convention for the new ArcGIS Locators is <data source> < data product > <Locator> which would work splendidly were it not for the fact that one of the data products is itself called ‘OS Locator’. However if you remember this exception to the rule, then generally any service whose name ends in ‘Locator’ is an ArcGIS Locator and will not work in LocalView Fusion.

The other area of LocalView where you will see these new locators in a list is when you go to Content > Add Map 

Since these are gazetteers rather than maps, we will shortly be hiding them from this list, but for the moment this is the other place you will see them listed with LocalView Fusion. 

In summary, if you are already using the LocatorHub based gazetteers then you do not need to do anything. These will continue to work.

Upgrading LocatorHub

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We recommended when we released LocalView Fusion 4.2 that you should upgrade your LocatorHub at the same time.  We wanted to take this opportunity to provide you further information on how to do this and why we are recommending it.

LocatorHub is the address gazetteering component of LocalView Fusion which allows you to load in address datasets and then publish a gazetteer that can be used to search for an address.

Some of you may not been aware that LocatorHub is a separate application and needs upgrading independently.  You may be running a version that is no longer supported and you may have missed out on the new features within LocatorHub such as support for Ordnance Survey AddressBase products. You can check the LocatorHub Product Lifecycle document on our web pages for more information.

LocatorHub can be downloaded with your new version of LocalView Fusion (please contact support@esriuk.com if you do not have the download details).   Once you have the installer please follow the steps below:

  1. Save your current settings of LocatorHub. This is detailed within the 'LocatorHub Installation Guide' contained as part of the installation media.
  2. Uninstall LocatorHub.
  3. If you are also upgrading your version of ArcGIS we recommend that you do this before installing the latest version of LocatorHub.
  4. Run through the LocatorHub installation wizard.
  5. Check to see if there are post-installation steps from your previous version detailed in the 'LocatorHub Installation Guide'.
  6. Reinstate the previous configuration.

There are a few things to watch out for when you are upgrading LocatorHub:

  • If you are using LocalView Fusion to consume LocatorHub with ArcGIS for Server 10.1 then you will need to change the way you search feature classes as Feature Class Locators are no longer supported. We will be following this post up with another explaining what you can do instead using new LocatorHub functionality
  • LocatorHub version 5.0 uses a .NET 4.0 application pool and so this will need to be configured in IIS.  The steps to do this are detailed in the LocatorHub ‘Installation Guide’ which is included in the install media for LocatorHub
  • There have been schema changes to many of the source datasets (especially NLPG).  It is worth checking that your address data will work with the new schema which later versions of LocatorHub will support.
  • If you have upgraded to a full licence of LocatorHub and have integrated it into applications other than LocalView Fusion, then you should check that those applications are working against the upgraded LocatorHub services. 

If you would like the Esri UK Implementation Services team to assist in your upgrade of LocatorHub and/or LocalView Fusion then please contact your Customer Success Manager for a quotation.