EXPANDEDLINK Field Type

This field type is designed to help you link a bunch of existing pictures or documents to their respective features on a layer.  It does this by converting (or "expanding") the values from a certain field of your layer into complete URLs. 

The Problem

1. You have some Shapefile or other GIS file containing links to pictures for each record in the file.
2. The pictures are all stored in a folder on a local drive such as "D:\Pictures\FireHydrants"
3. Your GIS file has a column named "Hyperlink" and each record has a Hyperlink value of something like "D:\Pictures\FireHydrants\201711211644.jpg"
4. You import this GIS file into Diamond Maps but you don't see your pictures because Diamond Maps can't link to files stored on your local computer.
5. You could add an ATTACH field to your layer and then procede to manually upload each picture one at a time assigning each to its respective feature, but that would be painfully slow and take forever.

The Solution

1. You batch upload of all of your pictures to a cloud hosting service such as dropbox or a Diamond Maps FTP folder.  But the file names in your Hyperlink field are still referring to documents on the D: drive.
2.  So you change your layer's Hyperlink field type from TEXT to EXPANDEDLINK.  And with a small amount of setup work, all of your Hyperlinks get automatically translated into fully qualified paths that link to their respective documents.

How To Do This

Upload Files

In order for your pictures to be accessible by your users on their phones and computers, they have to be stored on the internet somewhere.  If you already have a favorite place to store these like dropbox.com, or your own website then go ahead and put them there.  If you don't, then just ask us and we can provide you with an FTP login that you can use to batch upload your pictures and store them on the Diamond Maps server.  There is no extra charge for hosting your pictures but we do charge extra for hosting video files.

Create hyperlinks using [FILENAME] place holder

• In this scenario lets assume that you uploaded all of your hydrant pictures to a folder on Diamond Maps with a web address of

      http://diamondmaps.com/customerdocs/AbcWaterCo/HydPics

• And lets assume one of those pictures have link text like "D:\\Hydrants\2012\Pics\1234.jpg"
• In  Diamond Maps click Layers, then click Fire Hydrants, then click More, then click Add/Remove Fields.
• Find the field name containing your hyperlinks in the list and click the "Edit" link next to it.
• Change the field type from TEXT to EXPANDEDLINK

• In the "Link Template" box type

      http://diamondmaps.com/customerdocs/AbcWaterCo/HydPics/[FILENAME]

• Click OK and then click Apply Changes.  You're done!

The [FILENAME] place holder ignores the full path of the file and inserts only the filename and extension into the link.  To test your new hyperlink, click on one of your fire hydrants on your map and then click on the link in your hyperlink field.  So the resulting link will be

    http://diamondmaps.com/customerdocs/AbcWaterCo/HydPics/1234.jpg

Create hyperlinks using [VALUE] place holder

Alternately, if you need to preserve the folder structure spelled out in your hyperlink field then use the [VALUE] place holder instead. For example, let's say that you have two different folders storing your hydrant pictures based on the year they were taken and this folder is spelled out in the hyperlink values such as. 

• D:\\2012Pics\1234.jpg
• D:\\2017Pics\5678.jpg

So you use a Link Template of this

    http://diamondmaps.com/customerdocs/AbcWaterCo/[VALUE]

And your resulting links will look like this

• http://diamondmaps.com/customerdocs/AbcWaterCo/2012Pics/1234.jpg
• http://diamondmaps.com/customerdocs/AbcWaterCo/2017Pics/5678.jpg

Notice that the drive letter and leading slashes in the hyperlink field value are ignored.  However the folder name(s) are preserved.