Importing and Exporting Visual Artifacts

This set of features address the following real-world scenarios:

  1. Porting visual artifacts from development/testing environments to production deployments.
  2. Creating back-ups of ArcViz artifacts.
  3. Sharing these artifacts in communities.

In an enterprise environment, it is a common practice to develop and test applications in one environment before making them widely available in a client-facing production environment.

Arcadia Enterprise provides an easy UI method to export visual artifacts (visuals, dashboards, and apps, plus their dependencies) by saving them to a *.json format file. This file can then be used to import the visual artifacts to a new system, where they can be successfully deployed (provided the new environment has identical data connections).

Remember that ArcViz visual artifacts do not store the actual raw data, or results of queries; instead, they contain information about the layout and settings, the associated dataset, style customizations, and the query. When saving artifact information for export, Arcadia Enterprise also captures all these dependencies. For example, when you export a visual that uses a custom style, the export includes that custom style, as well as the dataset. As a result, when you import the visual into a new system, it looks exactly the same as it did at the source.

Supported Visual Artifacts

Exportable visual artifacts include datasets, linked visuals, dashboards, custom styles, custom colors (palettes), segments, and static assets.

Thumbnail Support

The Export utility automatically exports any existing thumbnails. When it comes to Import, you have the option of importing the thumbnails into the new installation, generating new thumbnails at import, or skipping thumbnail processing.

Export

Export dashboards, linked visuals, or complete apps.

The export generates a *.json file and saves it into the user's download directory. It can then be shared, and imported into multiple systems.

You require the Manage visuals and dashboards privilege to export visual artifacts.

See Exporting Dashboards, Exporting Linked Visuals, and Exporting Apps.

Import

Import visuals and dashboards, or import complete apps, using the file generated by the export functionality. This import file, *.json, must be present on the client machine.

When we import artifacts, Arcadia Enterprise recognizes if they have been previously imported. In such cases, we update the existing artifact instead of creating a new one. This ensures that the artifacts are correctly synchronized between development and production platforms.

The necessary import privileges depend on the operation. Here are some examples:

See Importing Dashboards, Importing Linked Visuals, and Importing Apps.

Data Compatibility

For migration to work properly, the destination system (which imports the visual artifacts) has to have a valid connection to the data, and that data must be in a table that matches the name. When you import a visual artifacts file with the Check data table compatibility option enabled, the import stops when it cannot find a necessary table on the connection.

Some environments use multi-connection architecture for table access. In such cases, users must disable the Check data table compatibility option to successfully complete import into a single connection. After the import completes, users can re-route the data connections of datasets as necessary.

Imports: Global vs. Workspace-Specific

When importing visuals and dashboards, Arcadia Enterprise checks to verify if these artifacts already exist on the target system. By default, it examines all dashboards and visuals for a UUID match. Selecting the Disregard artifacts that exist in other workspaces option on import limits this search to the target workspace.

Migration with REST APIs

For scenarios where migrations are regularly occuruing tasks, Arcadia Enterprise ships with a set of REST APIs that may be used in scheduled scripts. Note that this approach involves authentications with data API keys.

See Migration with REST APIs.