Thanks for the comments Jason, hope these answers help...

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It looks like you are passing Google Earth a link to your map server, which returns an image. Is this session based? If a user saves the network link in their Places, will it still work later?



There is no concept of sessions, if the user saves the link there is no trouble. Our map servers (there are 12 of them btw) are basically stateless.

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Have you considered writing an application that returns point/line/poly data to Google Earth? I'd imagine that with ArcObjects it wouldn't be too hard to extract the coordinates and build this into KML. Symbolization would be somewhat problematic though.



Yep, that's the idea behind our "Property" layer, the points are all centroids from our taxlots file. We are working on line/poly data. Hopefully it all works as fluid as groundoverlays, we have seen GE slow down quite a bit in some of the examples of custom geometries. I guess there is no free lunch with rendering. =o)

Brian Flood is working on a MXD -> KML tool: http://www.spatialdatalogic.com/cs/blogs/brian_flood/

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- Pass range/tilt angle along with the BBOX variable in the NetworkLink call




This is apparently going to be supported in the future (see post)





Excellent! Thanks for the heads up, sounds like the GE guys are making it even easier than I would have hoped for.

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- Ability to load <description></description> via a URL for points (this could be HUGE for allowing integration into new and existing GIS apps)




OHHH. That's a great idea. I've already been taking advantage of this with the placemarks in Google Maps. The HTML support in Google Earth may need to be improved to support some of those apps though.

Jason



More or less what I am looking for is a way to dynamically load more information when a user clicks on a placemark. This way you could create functionality similar to an "identify" in a GIS tool. Right now you can link to a web page (too many steps), or load all the info up front into the KML (too much processing work/big downloads.) If I could render it in a full HTML reader that would be a big bonus, but the dynamic loading is what I need.

-Phillip