PDS of Kenton County (PDS) is the planning and development services agency for Kenton County, Kentucky, and provides public GIS mapping and property-data services for the region. Bowman migrated the agency’s public GIS application from ArcGIS Web AppBuilder to ArcGIS Experience Builder.
Challenge
The retirement of ArcGIS Web AppBuilder meant PDS had to move its public application to ArcGIS Experience Builder, and they needed to do so without losing functionality. The application included a custom widget that lets the public select and purchase GIS data, with fee handling built in. Custom widgets are the part of a Web AppBuilder migration that usually means rebuilding by hand.
Solution
Bowman migrated the application through its Web AppBuilder–to–Experience Builder migration service. This included:
- Converting the application with Bowman’s AI-driven migration pipeline. Maps, layers, filters, queries and standard widget configuration carried over into Experience Builder, and we verified the result. A GIS engineer then refined styling, icons and layout to match the original application.
- Converting the custom data-purchase widget through the same pipeline, rather than rebuilding by hand. Custom widgets have no equivalent in Experience Builder, so they typically have to be rebuilt. Bowman converted this one instead, then refined it over several rounds of engineering until the data selection, configuration options and purchase workflow, including fee handling, matched the original.
- Running the converted application and widget through customer testing and feedback before final hand-off.
Impact
PDS of Kenton County’s public GIS application now runs on ArcGIS Experience Builder, a framework Esri actively supports. Its public-facing functionality came through intact, including the custom data-purchase workflow. The migrated app looks and behaves like the one it replaced, so users didn’t have to relearn anything.
