What's new in Geoportal Server 3.0.1
We are excited to bring you Geoportal Server 3.0.1! Here you will find the major updates and enhancements in this release.
Note! Geoportal Server 3.0.1 has breaking changes when compared to 2.x. This is why we increased the major release number.
The biggest update for Geoportal Server is the move to version 4.x of the ArcGIS API for JavaScript. With 3.x reaching end of life as of July, 2024, it was high time for us to update to 4.x. The search map, preview, and item footprint, and map viewer all now use 4.x. There is one big hold out using 3.x: the metadata editor. To continue supporting custom metadata editors, we decided to keep using the 3.x version there until metadata editing and customization is available in 4.x.
You will find the ArcGIS API for JavaScript version in /webapp/lib/init.js.
In addition to ArcGIS API for JavaScript 3.x, ArcGIS Web AppBuilder was also retired as of July 2024. It has served us well for almost 10 years. We decided not to use ArcGIS Experience Builder, but instead include a built-in viewer based on ArcGIS API for JavaScript 4.
The new viewer has the search widget included (also ported to 4.x). The viewer supports the following layer types:
|
 |
We continue to work on our implementation of the STAC API and are seeing great potential and adoption of this specification. Geoportal 3.0.1 adds:
- Manage STAC Collections and Items
- Configurable Validation Rules
- Unique property value
- Intersect collection geometry
- Property value must match regular expression
- Property is mandatory
- Configurable mapping from STAC properties to search index fields
- Reproject STAC Item geometries - this capability uses an ArcGIS Server Geometry Service to perform various operations (project, intersect).
With the increased use of Geoportal Server as a STAC server, it became clear that posting JSON to the STAC API to create/update/delete collections was not sufficient. We therefor added a new Collections tab!
| The new tab allows for managing STAC collections, including a geometry of the collection. When configured this geometry is used to verify if STAC Items intersect the Collection |  |
As we do more deployments of Geoportal Server in the cloud, we have expanded our support for AWS OpenSearch Serverless. Now you can configure both the Managed Cluster and Serverless offerings for highly scalable indexes. See https://github.com/Esri/geoportal-server-catalog/wiki/Amazon-Opensearch-Serverless for more details.
Small but useful enhancement is the ability to hide tabs through configuration. Not always do you need the About tab or when using Geoportal Server to serve STAC, the Admin tab to create/upload XML-based metadata is not used. In /app/context/app-config.js you can select which tabs to show in the setting showTabs.
Securing Geoportal Server has been enhanced via another new setting in app-config.js. When setting secureCatalogApp: true anonymous access to the Geoportal Server web application is no longer allowed. Any user will need to sign in.
In the configuration files, passwords for users (when using simple authentication) can be hashed. LDAP and search index passwords can be encrypted.
The configuration of Geoportal Server has various updates/enhancements supporting the new capabilities. See https://github.com/Esri/geoportal-server-catalog/wiki/Installing-Geoportal-Server-3.0.1#configure-geoportal-server for more details.