I'm beginning to learn widget creating in Esri's Web Appbuilder for ArcGIS, but I'm having some problems getting the code to display when I make changes.
Coming from a Visual Studio-based web/Windows development background, I'm used to being able to make a few minor changes and then hit the debug button to see the changes in action. With the widget development, I'll make changes to my code (widget.js or widget.html) but then I'm unable to view the changes in the Web App (it always shows the last visible version).
Simply refreshing the page does not work, nor does clearing the cache or other web data. I've even tried restarting the node server and Web Appbuilder itself, but no go. The only thing that has worked so far is to delete the app I put the widget into, then create a new app and load the widget into that one. This seems to work most times, but it is tedious and time consuming. I got the idea from https://geonet.esri.com/thread/120241, but that is from the beta of Web Appbuilder nearly 2 years ago. Is there a better method for regularly refreshing a widget during development?
Best Answer
Robert Scheitlin, one of the most knowledgeable contributors for Web AppBuilder development on GeoNet, uses this workflow for developing new widgets: