Previously, Great Arc had built and implemented an Autodesk MapGuide solution for viewing land, electric, and gas data on the Internet for NIPSCO. The site was initially driven by an Access database and was eventually migrated to SQL Server. The application was built using HTML, JavaScript, Cold Fusion, and the MapGuide API. NIPSCO was in the process of migrating the Autodesk data to an ArcFM format using ArcSDE SQL Server as the database backend. Because of the large number of users of the MapGuide application, it also would need to be migrated to an ESRI environment in order to best use the new data.

In the original MapGuide system, there was a large number of pages created to drive the application. Each feature had its own query, report, details page. This made maintenance and addition of new information a very time-consuming process. In order to alleviate this problem, Great Arc developed the new system to be XML-driven. The queries, reports, details pages, as well as any map tools or other features for the application were built into an XML document. This would allow for a single central location for maintaining and updating any feature in the application.

Additionally, the data model being deployed with the migration was very complex. There were domains, subtypes, and relationships present in the database, which are not natively supported by ArcIMS. In order to maintain these features in the ArcIMS application, Great Arc built an authoring tool to allow the importing and use of XML documents exported out of the Geodatabase using ESRI’s Geodatabase Designer.

Great Arc’s solution, Facility Browser, incorporates the XML-driven design as well as the required domains and subtypes into a cohesive web application that allows users to navigate, query, and report on all of the NIPSCO enterprise data. Facility Browser was built using Great Arc’s MapXtender product, which provides authoring tools for creating feature-rich web and desktop applications.