Customizing the Map Navigator 'On Map' Tools

The Map Navigator is a really useful set of tools for quick and easy navigation around your ArcPad Project and – like everything in ArcPad – it is totally customizable!

The potential is there for you to add extra tools to the Map Navigator, change the 'use once' nature of the current tools and increase the amount of map real-estate on your mobile device by removing all toolbars and placing your project specific tools on the map.

The options for the Map Navigator are stored within the ArcPad.apx configuration file. You can open your ArcPad.apx in ArcPad Studio to edit the XML and create a custom set of tools to put on your map. The options for customization are as follows:

Style – There are 4 styles of Map Navigator:

      Style 0 – Tall Cross

         Style 1 – Wide Cross

Style 2 – Cross

   Style 3 – Vertical

Map Navigator Style 1

 Map Navigator Style 2

 Map Navigator Style 3

Location – The Map Navigator can be aligned to the left or right of the map display by setting the 'horzalignment' element to either 'left' or 'right'.

Tint and Background Colour – These are both RGB inputs for the display of the tools on the Map Navigator. The tint is used to colour the icons for the map navigator and the background colours the background of the icons.

Transparency - The transparency of the backgrounds of the tool icons on the Map Navigator can be set by selecting a value between 0.0 (completely transparent) and 1.0 (completely opaque). 

 Red Icons (tintcolor="255,0,0")

Black Background (backgroundcolor="0,0,0" transparency="1.0") 

Button Size - The default button size for the Map Navigator is 0. If you want the button size to be larger, you can set button size to 2, 3 or 4 etc.

Tools – You can have up to 8 ArcPad Tools on your custom Map Navigator. The easiest place to find a list of the command names for all of the tools in ArcPad is on the Favorites Tab on the Toolbar Settings dialog (where you choose the tools to appear on the Favorites Toolbar). The order of the tools in the ArcPad.apx will determine the order in which the tools are displayed on the Map Navigator.

Flip Icons – In order to make your Map Navigator as aesthetically pleasing as possible when using a cross-style layout, you can flip your icons on their vertical axis by setting the value for the 'flip' attribute to 'true'. 

Use Once – The default Map Navigator has the tools set to ‘use once’ mode so that you can quickly zoom around your map when editing without changing tools. If you want the tools on your Map Navigator to remain selected, you can set the ‘use once’ attribute to false.   

Here is the XML for the default Map Navigator in ArcPad:

And here is some example XML for a customized Map Navigator (as seen at the 2011 ESRI User Conference)

And for those of you who do not want ANY form of Map Navigator Tools in their ArcPad Project, you can hide it by un-checking 'Map Navigator' in the QuickAccess menu.

So go forth and customize you Map Navigator 'On Map' Tools and feel free to share your experiences with the Map Navigator in the comments below.