Bridge pane

The dockable GeoCat Bridge pane is where you can manage your data spaces and view the progress of publishing actions. You can also preview SLD style conversions here and save the results to disk (licensed users only).

At the top level, you will find 2 tabs: Data Spaces and Style Preview.

Data Spaces tab

This tab will allow you to select an active data space (which also can be done from the GeoCat Bridge ribbon tab) and manage its contents.

 
 

Active Workspace selector

If you have selected an active data space that has been configured with a GeoServer connection, you should see an Active workspace selector (dropdown) that allows you to select the GeoServer target workspace to browse through or publish to.

Changing the Active workspace will automatically reload its contents displayed below it.

To the right of the Active workspace selector, you will see 3 buttons:

Screenshot

 Refresh button Add Workspace button Delete Workspace button

This button can be used to force-reload the workspace contents from GeoServer.

In most cases, you don't need to click this button, as contents are auto-refreshed regularly. However, if you notice that the contents are outdated, you can use this button to force a refresh.

Clicking this button will pop up a dialog to add a new workspace to the GeoServer node of the active data space.

In the dialog, you can specify the name of your new workspace. Optionally, you can also set the namespace URI for the workspace, or mark it as isolated.

Screenshot

This button can be used to delete the selected active workspace from GeoServer. Please note that this action cannot be undone, and that all data in the workspace will be purged. However, GeoCat Bridge will first ask you to confirm the deletion.

Licensing note

If you are running the Community Edition, you cannot add or delete workspaces, and the respective buttons will be disabled. If you have selected the GeoCat Live Demo data space however, you should be able to add a new workspace, but workspaces can still not be removed manually. Instead, they will be automatically removed each night.

Contents pane

Below the Active workspace selector, you will find a tree view showing the contents of the selected workspace.

Did you know...

You can add GeoServer (group) WMS layers to your map by clicking the right mouse button on the layer in the tree view of the active workspace, and selecting Add to map from the context menu.

The Contents pane can currently list the following item types:

• Layers (in ascending order)
• Layer Groups (in ascending order, and all child layers in particular order)
• Styles (in ascending order)

Publisher pane

The Publisher pane is a special one, because it is only visible when:

1. You clicked one of the Publish buttons in the ribbon, so you can stage the layers that you want to publish.
2. A publication process is running.
3. A publication process has finished, and you want to view the results.

Once you close the Publisher pane, you can only reopen it by clicking one of the Publish buttons again.

Layer Staging

Before you start publishing, you may still wish to change the target workspace, or change the items that you want to publish. This is the purpose of the staging phase.

You also see an overview here of all the layer that will be published. There may be "unpublishable" layers (e.g. invisible, wrong layer type, etc.).

Screenshot

In some cases, e.g. when publishing individual layers instead of a whole workspace, you may override the items that you wish to publish. For example, you can disable the automatic creation of group layers by deselecting the checkbox.

Tip

When you are publishing a whole map as a workspace using the Publish Map button, it is possible to skip the layer staging phase, and start publishing immediately.

You can adjust this behavior in the Options section of the configuration.

Publish Progress

Once the publication has been started by clicking the Publish button in the staging panel, you will see a Please wait... cursor at the top and a progress bar and information at the bottom of the pane.

You currently cannot cancel this process, and you can only use the Style Preview while a publication is running. However, you can still do other things in ArcGIS Pro while publishing.

If the publication process finished (successfully or not), you will see a summary of the results.

Publish Results

Once the publication has finished, you will see a summary of the results.

If the whole publication failed, you will see an error message at the top of the pane. If the publication was (partially) successful, you can expand the problematic layers (marked with a ) to find out what the problem is.

Layers marked with a have been skipped during the publication process.
Bridge should have already marked these as "unpublishable" in the staging phase.
Note that skipped layers count as successful publications.

Expand the successful layers (marked with a ) to add them to the map or show their capabilities or metadata record.

Note that this version of GeoCat Bridge does not store the publication result.
Closing the result pane will remove the results from memory. This will happen if:

• You click the Close button.
• You click the button.
• Start another publication process.

Screenshot

Style Preview tab

GeoCat Bridge currently only supports publishing to GeoServer, and internally, GeoServer uses SLD (Styled Layer Descriptor) 1.1 files to render layer symbology.

This is why GeoCat Bridge will generate SLD from ArcGIS Pro layer styles.

To preview how Bridge will translate the symbology, you can click on a layer in the Table of Contents (TOC) of the active map while having the Style Preview tab open.

This will render a preview of the SLD, where all referenced images (if any) are replaced by dummy file names.
Licensed users however can also save the SLD (and auxiliary files like PNG's or SVG's) to disk.

Tip

If there are issues with the SLD conversion, these will be listed on the Warnings subpanel.
You can click on the icon to show the panel.