The TimeSlider functionality in the ArcGIS Server JS API is great for working with time-based vector features – you can scroll forwards and backwards through time to see the vector features which existed at a given time instant.
Has anyone created a similar time-slider for rasters?
I have a series of monthly weather grids which I'd like to display, allowing the user to scroll to any month (eg, show me the average rainfall for June).
The time-slider relies on the featureclass being defined in ArcMap with a Time attribute, but this isn't available for raster layers.
The best workaround I can think of is:
- create a separate map document for each raster
- build a separate tiled map service from each map document
- add a DOJO slider to the map, with increments to mark each raster
- use JavaScript to switch the appropriate raster on at each mark on the DOJO slider
Is anyone aware of a better/faster approach? This will be quite a laborious process as it will mean creating and maintaining multiple MXDs and MSDs.
Thanks
Best Answer
The new mosaic datasets are time-aware and can be published as image services (requires Image extension)
Esri has a javascript sample , and if you look at the image service details you can see that there is a time extent along with the normal spatial extent, and even the Query operation supports time.
This is definitely a neater solution (provided you have access to the Image Extension), but under moderate load or large extents, I would speculate that switching between tiled services could be faster.