ArcGIS Apps: Taking Your Maps Offline

welcome to arches apps taking your maps offline my name is Brent Pierce and I have the pleasure presenting today with Kevin Berg we're both prog engineers on the field apps team at ESRI and we're excited to talk about all the different offline capabilities we have in our apps so let's get started what are we gonna cover today first we'll go into overview her apps and their offline capabilities how they work offline and how we've engineered them to help you working in the field with no connectivity the line share the presentation will hinge around three different options you have for working offline the first being mobile map packages the second map areas which are defined in the web map and the third is really a variation of a second map areas but they're defined within the app itself then we'll go into offline base maps and how to work with those and then we'll finish up by talking about some future plans our team has for working offline so really it all starts with the ArcGIS platform this platform location enables all phases of field work so that means everything from understanding what's going on around you capturing that information and performing data collection in the field monitoring some of that information in real time or near real-time coordinating work amongst all your field staff that involves planning that work and then eventually navigating to that work area or that work site in an intelligent way so of course we have apps that do all these things and we've tried to round out our suite of field applications to really satisfy all different phases of work so navigators the ABI you would use to navigate explores the app use to kind of understand the world around you and take your maps offline we have a number of different apps for capturing data because it's such a critical workflow of course collectors the primary app but there's some other more nuanced apps such as survey one two three in quick capture allows you to capture data in a very specific way that would work with your organization's workflows after that data is captured operations dashboard and tracker help you monitor the workflows in the field and of course coordination of that work is very key and the key app we have for that is workforce but tracker and Explorer also work in concert with that solution to have a very sophisticated workflow for coordination and planning of work but everything kind of hinges off the workforce application so we have a well rounded suite of applications which really satisfy all the different fields of that and of course working offline is a key aspect to that so Captain Obvious would tell me that apps are not always connected but of course we know that you have to work in places that have terrible internet connectivity or have absolutely no internet connectivity so it's not just when you're completely disconnected your net connectivity could be very limited almost to a point where it's not usable it could be slow it could just be cost prohibitive just way too expensive to get a data plan for all your devices that your enterprise needs to use so really when we talk about offline working in our apps we took a key tenant that your whole GIS needs to work in an offline way so that means your Maps your GPS location your feature search your routing pop-ups really everything the field where shouldn't notice a difference when they're online versus offline that was our big audacious goal for jumping into offline and making sure it works on all our apps so most of our field apps already work offline and this has been a big focus of our engineering efforts over the last four or five years Collector was really the first app to have offline capabilities but soon after that explorer and navigator followed with slightly different paradigms for how you work offline and then tracker survey one two three quick capture all came around and they also have a different paradigm for working offline the key thing is they all work offline and you can do everything you could do online with them offline so as I said in the intro there's really three myths at all methodologies for taking your maps off one mobile map packages map areas defined in the web map and map areas defined in the application so if we really only take away one thing from this presentation is that there's three different types of way working with offline and they all behave slightly differently so you have to decide what's best for your organization we're gonna drill into each one of these now now mobile map packages are an ArcGIS Pro based solution you author the map package and pro and then you share it with your field workers and they download it the next two are web map based solutions so as the name would imply you define it in the web map and create the web map in such a way that areas are defined or else areas can be defined so that's your first decision point can I work with our Jazz Pro in mobile my packages or do I want to just work with web maps so the for the first methodology mobile map packages who's using them today and why so mo map packages came around because of navigator we needed a way to have offline navigation and you can see in that video this is actually a customer video at the bottom of your screen and it shows navigator top right what you see in navigator and then what you're seeing you know via the dashboard cam so you can see this is completely off the beaten path it's doing navigation completely offline and we created mold map packages as a structure that can have your whole G is contained on your device in a file structure that can be easily downloaded and updated so they're using a mobile package to navigate somewhere without connectivity whatsoever it has a lot of logic on it because it has the whole network so really who we see use mobile app packages are people that need to navigate on private roads people that need to navigate in the middle of nowhere with no internet connectivity people that need to drive to assets and search for those assets all that's contained within that mobile map package we're also seeing mobile web packages being used in slightly other context so after we got navigator out there we started supporting mobile app packages and apps like Explorer and people are using mobile app packages just half a digital version of that paper map that sits in the back of your field vehicle so here they are creating a mobile map package and pro and just downloading those into a bunch of devices and then that device would be mounted or available in the vehicle the nice thing here is can be easily updated well we're also seeing the old map package used as use anonymously so Explorer can be used without signing in with a renamed user at all so you can author a mold map pack additionally a publisher extension and then anyone can download Explorer for free and can use the mobile map package for free so that's what we're talking about with anonymous use we're seeing a uptick on people that are using mobile packages for this very purpose it's really simple you can host them at the file and your website have a link to Explorer to download that file and all they have to do is download Explorer in the app store and tap on that link or scan the QR code as it were the third common use case we're seeing with mobile app which is our developers so people are writing their own apps using a runtime SDK or app studio and they just want to embed some data that their app will always use well mobile app package is a great compressed format where they can author their maps make them look great have all the capabilities in them and just store the file as an artifact of the app itself so when you download the app you have all the data you need to know in need and it's ready to go again moma packages the key factor here is they're created using ArcGIS Pro so what does this look like first you go into pro to actually create the mole mount package itself and package up your project into a format that can be downloaded by our devices after you've done that you share it or upload it either to enterprise or ArcGIS online as a item and then share it with your field workers and when they log in to their applications they can see it in an application here I'm showing navigator but it also works for apps like Explorer they see that and they can simply download it to a device just like they would a song or a movie it's just a file at that point you know one note once you've downloaded it you can also check for updates so if that file gets updated in the future you can download a new version of that and replace the file you have on disk now I haven't talked about this yet but sideloading is really the ability to take that file format and just manually load it onto the device so you could couple or wire a device into your machine and then just drag it over into the appropriate folder and it will show up and whatever whatever application you side-loaded it into a lot of customers are doing this when they have really large MMP case and they don't want to have to wait to download them over a Wi-Fi connection or maybe they can't download it over the Wi-Fi connection so a lot of people are side loading MMP kaise and since it's just one file format that's relatively easy to do and can be automated a little bit more on creating these using pro so here I have a screen grab of just a really simple project for the Palm Springs area in ArcGIS pro you can see on the right hand side this is the metal map package tool I author some properties here and then I package it up and it spits out the mobile map package file so I have a couple links in here that you could follow that tell you walk you through the process of creating and you offer some best practices of creating mold map packages using ArcGIS pro but you can author your base map you can author your operational errors you can even use stuff like vector tile packages whenever possible where all our apps are optimized to use vector tile packages or vector tiles in a very efficient way so that's creating mobile in my package using our GIS pro in this demo I just want to show the experience you would get if using an app like Explorer or navigator or any map or any app that supports mobile map packages so I've opened Explorer on my iPhone here and this is the Browse view so these are all the maps I have access to and some of these are our web maps others are mobile app packages so I can quickly download any one of these and it will download these directly to the device so as I start downloading you'll get some kind of indication of progress along the download path and I'll we'll just wait for it to pull this down over my Wi-Fi connection right now now that's finished downloading I can it's on my device so I can go completely offline and I can tap on it and work with the mobile map package just like I would and the other map and of course whatever was authored in this project is available for me so if I tap on any one of these features I can get access to the actual attributes the pop-up I can navigate to it I can I can use compass mode I can even favorite the item so again a very simple experience just like you're downloading a song or a movie onto your device and then once downloaded I can work with it completely offline so it's a very quick demo on how to use mobile map packages and really what the experience looks like once they mobile my package has been created for you and shared with you let's talk about the other two methodologies for working with your Maps offline now the second methodology our map area is defined in the web map so how this works is you go into the web map either in enterprise or an art just online and you really just define a couple offline areas as soon as that's done what his map areas get created in the backend by the backend servers get published and created either an enterprise or offline for you so you really don't have to do anything here you just define the areas you want to be taken offline in the future and then everything is handled in the backend for you and once these are created these can then be downloaded to a device much like a mobile map package can be the experience is relatively similar there now once they're downloaded to the device Maps can check for updates and quickly synchronize the changes now one note on the third methodology offline areas but instead of being defined in the web map here they're being defined in the application itself so here the workflow starts from the app you go into the app may be an app like collector and you say hey I want to take this area offline I know this afternoon I'm going to be working in this area I have connectivity now I'm going to define the extent of that area and some properties as soon as that's done it gets created and as soon as it's created it gets downloaded onto the device and again maps on the device can check for any data updates since I've downloaded the initial area I'm gonna go into a little more depth on some of the areas that Brent had already discussed earlier the first area that we're going to discuss is working with map areas defined in the web map and kind of what that process entails and how to generate these map areas how to use them in the app and there's some general information around them when working with them so the first area we're gonna go into is creating these map areas for the web map this functionality for generating map areas is available through ArcGIS online as well as ArcGIS Enterprise 10 7 and newer what we're looking at right now is the web map item details for a gas utility network map that I'm going to be constructing these areas for what we're gonna do when I start playing the video that we're gonna go here is we access the map areas authoring experience through the web map settings so we're going to go ahead and get that started and kind of see what that experience is okay there finally got the video plane okay so now we're in the settings for the web map and now in this offline area we're gonna go ahead and pause this for one second in the offline section here within the web map settings if you don't see this section chances are there's either a layer or multiple layers that are in your web map that aren't either offline enabled or supported for offline use so that would be one indicator to double-check the layers that are in that map if you don't see this offline area section we're gonna go under this second subsection called map areas and we're gonna click on this manage areas button so let's go and proceed so this takes us into the authoring experience for creating these map areas ultimately what we're going to be doing when these map areas are when the data loads I guess from the web map is we're gonna be creating three map areas for this in various different ways that we can have access to within the application so what we're looking at is the same web map and the features will load that would be visible in the map viewer so we're going to click create area to start this experience now we're gonna give it a unique name so that it shows up more helpful in the map itself this is gonna be for the Wheaton area and we're gonna construct a rectangular area that encompasses all of the features that are within the Wheaton area I'm going to digitize that okay we're gonna leave the level of detail as is and we're going to go and click Save in the bottom left corner this is going to start packaging all the file components for this area while that's packaging we're gonna create our second area and we're going to create this for the Naperville area which is south of Wheaton so we're gonna create it in a similar way similar rectangular area and we're gonna alter the level of detail to give us more detailed ability to zoom in further for these features we're gonna click Save and start that packaging process finally we're gonna go and create our third area but we're gonna do it a bit differently than using a rectangular area because these are linear features for the Aurora area or roughly the Aurora area we're gonna create a polygon area so this is an irregularly shaped polygon and we're gonna sketch along these linear features to just scope it to just the features that we want because if we were to create this as a rectangular area there'd be a lot of empty map space in the north and the south of these features that we don't necessarily need so we're just gonna kind of define it just for these linear features we're gonna double click to stop that we're gonna increase our level of detail again so that we can see it more closely on zooming in we're gonna click Save now as you can see all three areas are being packaged and as you navigate through each of these areas it's gonna highlight and center that area on your map so you can kind of find what area you're working with just kind of the navigation experience so there's wheaton we're gonna go over to Naperville and you can see it highlights kind of in a darker shade that way you know the area that you're selecting and finally the aurora one that we just digitized lastly I'm gonna I'm gonna stop on the Wheaton area for a moment after we go into it so a few areas on one I want to point out so right now you can see that we're packaging right what that means and you can see we have one file that's listed right here called the vector now in my web map I am using the streets vector based map right and I also so I only have a single tiled service in my web map in addition to that I have a single hosted feature service although that feature service has at about 20 layers in it it's only going to generate a single a single local geo database for that service therefore in general you get one file per unique service in that map so for example if you have multiple tiled services both as base maps and is operational layers in addition to multiple individual services like feature server in your map you're going to get a single file generated for each of those services so in my case I only have two services in my map so I'm going to get two files so if you're working with a very complex map that has a lot of services that you might take longer to package because there's a lot more file components to it so we're gonna go ahead and proceed so this is going to continue to package until it's done it will it will the packaging text will go away once the process is completed we're not gonna wait for that process to get done because it could take a few minutes so we're gonna kind of just let it do its thing and while we move on okay so that was kind of the experience for building the map areas so if we wanted to continue on and see how that experience translates into using it in the application I'm using collector for ArcGIS in this case the same experience applies to Explorer for arcgis as well you can see before I play the video that we have our three areas for wheaton for Naperville and for Aurora you can see that each of these areas has a corresponding download size this is very important to understand because because of the fact that we've already pre-built these areas so all the necessary file components are already been generated we can provide this size for this download because at this point it's really just the files were downloading we're not having to generate the files as if we were generating the area directly within the app itself we will get into that in my next discussion but right now we're just going to focus on the areas we've already generated so we're gonna kind of see how that works so let's kind of start this and you can see all we got to do is download we have to click download for all of them it will progress you'll see the size counting up and with a little movie magic I made this speed up just a bit so we'd have to wait for all these to download you can see that they will all download in this scenario it happens relatively quick because again we're just downloading the file so it's just the file sizes that we're getting let's go and open up one of the areas this is our Aurora area and you can see the irregular shape we got these from our polygon all we're seeing is the linear features it's very useful for these types of geometries so we're going to just zoom in and kind of just do a little bit of an editing workflow here we're going to choose one of the features and we're gonna go ahead and just modify one of the attribute values just to kind of walk through what a synchronization would look like because we're using collector we can modify existing features and we're gonna before to perform a synchronization so we're just going to update the modify date to something more relevant say if we inspected that feature we're going to submit it and then we're gonna perform the synchronization which can be done directly within the map itself we also support auto synchronization which defaults to 15 minutes in this case we're not going to use it because we're just gonna perform a sync directly in addition to the 15 minute interval for auto sync you can't change it to 30 minutes or an hour depending on how frequently you want these features to be Auto synchronize it helps it so you don't have to remember to synchronize back in the office if you have internet connectivity with you while you're testing in the field so now let's go ahead and go on to some additional information about generating these map areas through the web map again like I mentioned it's available through ArcGIS online and our chess enterprise 10:00 to 7:00 and newer I'm you can generate these through directly through the web Maps settings again it's in the offline section of the settings under map areas and then you would click on manage areas so you can kind of easily navigate to that authoring experience through the web map itself you can create up to 16 areas per web map so there's a lot of flexibility with building these building these offline areas you can kind of create mosaics if you're working with a law with a large extent that one extent is too large what you could do is you can just generate six individual areas that kind of overlap each other to kind of get a similar experience as if it was one area you can construct each area as a rectangular or a regularly shaped polygon this is very useful like I demonstrated for linear features it makes more sense if you have the ability to just digitize the specific area that you want rather than generating a polygon and grabbing a lot of either other features or a lot of empty space that you may not necessarily need for that area now during the construction new area is very important collector as well as Explorer will display the text generating so if you were to go over to the app during the packaging process you'll see the word generating for that area all the areas will be listed so you would see in the case of the three we generated previously Wheaton Aurora and Naperville would be listed but they would all say generating under them that's because it's building those file components as I mentioned before that text will go away once the files are generated and then you'll see the download icon so you won't even have the ability to download it obviously until the files are available so we do give you indicators in the app because you may not necessarily be the author of these areas but are expecting to see these new areas available free to use safe if you're the field user working with areas that the GIS administrator has been constructing you'll get some some helper text if you will in the app itself to let you know that hey these area is coming down the pipeline but it's not available yet because it's still being generated so it's really helpful now so another topic is what do I do with existing map areas that I already have how do I update them to make sure that it's that my field workers are getting the most current set of changes that were made to this data so now we didn't go into this depth this depth in the demonstration I showed you but generating the areas but for each of the areas that I built these function now this functionality exists so for example in the Aurora area that I constructed earlier there's several available options if you click on the overflow menu for example next to the area name you can get a few different options edit and delete pretty self-explanatory edit allows you to alter the shape of the area delete caused you to just simply delete it but what I want to talk about is recreate area and in turn and also compared with refresh I'm going to talk about them individually but kind of to highlight the differences and why you'd want to use one versus the other now for recreate area this is useful when fields have been added or removed from a layer so if you made any schema changes to any of the layers in that in the map that comprises those map areas it might be one of the use-cases domains domains or feature templates have been modified so if you modified any of your coded ie domain you soar the domains themselves or you've modified your feature templates for example through the map viewer if you change your symbology to unique values so you get all the different unique templates for each of the features you're capturing might be an example of how you would modify your templates but it's very important to note that when you do a recreate area that all existing packages will be deleted and new packages will be created so this entails that users are your fuel users will need to redownload the new packages so it's very important in these scenarios that the filled users synchronize any local edits prior to doing a recreate area so they would then remove the Downloads that they have already performed and then they would just redownload the packages again so that I would get the updated changes now to refresh what is refresh meaning in terms of recreate area like why would use one versus the other so in this case you would use refresh when layers have been added or removed from the map so if you've modified the content of the map through adding layers or removing layers if the data for one or more feature layers have changed significantly since it was last packaged so for example using collector as an example edits are constantly being synchronized from multiple field devices right so the main services that make the web map will be updated but the the packages themselves will be static so they may not have all the edits from all of the field workers accessible in them so doing a refresh well up more-or-less update the contents of those packages this is not as extensive of a process as recreate area as it doesn't remove the existing packages it just as the name suggests refreshes the contents now this might entail any local packages needing to be resynchronized to get any of those changes for features as well or they can be redownload it in the case of adding or removing layers but they don't necessarily get lead 'add and recreated like recreate areas now the other functionality for updating existing areas is through what's called scheduled updates this functionality is very useful when your field users require regularly up did read-only content and read-only content is the key here to know what app can utilize this functionality collector cannot utilize this functionalities Explorer can utilize this functionality the reason why is because this is not supported with editing workflows only one because it's a one-way update as it suggests in the screenshot I gave you says allows apps that don't require editing to get updates based on defined schedule so this means that let's just say if you have imagery that constantly gets updated or other reference layers that are constantly being updated that you want to have the field workers regularly notified about so that can happen on a regular cadence with how you set up your scheduled updates for Explorer for example so it's very important that that functionality is known that it works for non editing apps in the case so just want to kind of point that out now the other thing I wanted to kind of point out is working with tile basement tile base maps which is pretty much every base map we work with you have two different types of ously we have raster tile based maps and we have vector table based Maps these are in terms of specifically of the Essery base maps so the ESRI raster child base maps for example such as like imagery and some of the other maps have a limitation of a hundred and fifty thousand tiles that can be exported when you do a download similarly with vector table base maps are limited to about ten thousand tiles now obviously these numbers can be different if you're creating your own custom base maps because you can control the tile limits when you generate your own these are just the ones that Azeri provides when you construct your web map but it's important understand these limitations if you're in a situation like the screenshot suggests where you have exceeded your maximum tile limit in that case you will get the red box and a warning that says map area to large reduce the area or the level of detail that is referring to this tile limitation being exceeded excuse me this tile imitation being exceeded so in that scenario it's either one or two ways can address this problem the extent needs to be reduced or the level of detail needs to be reduced if neither of those can accommodate the area you're trying to get remember you can take up to 16 areas offline as I mentioned before you can kind of mosaic them together overlap these areas so that it conforms to these limitations for the amount of tiles that are being generated but you also can get the extent and the ultimately the amount of data you want to take offline just something to be aware of so now we're going to switch gears a little bit now we talked about generating map areas and working with map areas that were generated through the web map so now we're gonna switch it to working with map areas that are defined or generated through the application itself again this would apply to collect or explore etc few the other apps as well so let's kind of see what that experience entails so now before I kind of get playing these two separate videos with slightly different workflows I kind of want to point out a few things so we can see over here on the left that we have our three areas that we already generated from the met the areas we created through the web map okay now in this case generating these map areas or oftentimes referred to as on-demand areas [Music] generates a it's a similar experience on the on the on the back-end server as far as the types of files that get generated it's just that in this case you're creating them on the fly versus having already pre generated them in the back office right so this process requests those files to be created waits for that process to be created and then downloads the package to the device now it's important understand one thing I wanted to point out as I mentioned before for the map areas that you generate through the web map you can see the Associated file sizes right now that's because those files already pre generated when it comes to creating map areas directly within the app that tie that size estimation isn't available because the files haven't been generated yet all the application is sending to is requesting for those areas to be created is the extent and the level of detail right but the server is still constructing those packages in those files once the process is completed in that area is downloaded to your device you will see a size but it can't be generated prior to those files being created so let's kind of see what that experience is to start you're in the same screen you can see how your available download areas in the very upper right corner next to gas utility network map you're going to click on that overflow menu and it's going to give you the option of ad offline area and this takes you into that authoring experience so in here we're seeing our web map and we're seeing our layers now one thing I wanted to point I'm going to kind of pause the video here for a moment this is very important to kind of understand is this bounding box this is the maximum of amount of tiles that can be generated for that extent and that level of detail now because we are using a vector base map we don't provide you the ability to of changing your level of detail because we give you all the available tiles for that area so there's no need we give you the most tiles that you can get for that area so there's no need and it's not necessary to provide a way to give you less because we just give you everything that's available because of how bad your tiles work on the backend but one thing that's very important to know is that this the the extent and the size of this bounding box will change depending on the density of the features that that comprise it so as we continue the video you'll see that as I zoom around the map in areas where there's less dense of features like in the Midwest there's not as many roads there's not as many features it's not going to be as it's gonna be a bigger box but if you go over a really densely featured area like LA it's really tiny so that means that it's going to be dependent upon the amount of features that are within it now in this case I'm going to use a bookmark and go back to our designated extent for the area that we want to take offline so we're gonna go ahead and open up our bookmarks and we're gonna go down to the Plainfield area now if you're zoomed in further than the bounding box extent like I just did you're gonna get the visible extent which is what you see right here so you're not going to so even though so you're only going to get what you'd look at so you can control you get by zooming in further but you can't take more if it's if you're if you're zoomed out past that bounding box if you will so let's go ahead and play this and now we're going to kind of Center on this area now we also have the ability of showing layers in this view so if you're you know if some layers are turned off that you expect to see and you want to make sure your layers are loading before you take a map offline you can click on the layers tool and you can see all the layers that are in here so you have quite a bit of layers in here so now what we got to do is click download area and then that process is started so we're gonna go ahead and do that and you can see it's the same download process and then it's gonna I'm gonna speed it up here to kind of do a little movie magic to make that go faster and then it's done you can see now we have a size available but it's already been downloaded and see it's very similar to the sizes of the other features that we've taken offline but obviously that size can be dependent upon the amount of features and layers and so on and so forth that are being downloaded so we're gonna kind of switch gears and that kind of now for this area now you can see right now I might pause the video one more time you can see in here it says we have area two that's a default naming convention not very helpful considering that the other ones have very meaningful names so when you generate areas directly from within the application you have the ability to rename them so we're gonna go ahead and do that you don't have this ability when it's a map you've generated through area you've generated through the web map because those have already been named you know ahead of time so those names are kind of gonna be applied on the download so now I have a more meaningful name for Plainfield which is the area that I generate that area for him you can open the map and and at this point you interact with it just like you did just like we saw with the other map areas so I'm gonna kind of switch gears a little bit now I showed you the experience of creating the offline area when you have a vector base map but it's a slightly different experience if you had a raster tile based map when you create map areas directly through the app so we're gonna go and start playing this one and I'm gonna go to a similar map at offline area now this is the same data but I just changed the base map to use imagery you're gonna see at the bottom it says level of detail at the very bottom of the video it says room right that's new because now you can choose a defined a well-known tile name right for that area now you can see I chose streets in that box still refers to the amount of maximum amount of tiles for that extent now for world it's pretty much everything you can take everything offline I'm it's a very coarse amount of tiles but we want to go back to room this is very very small box but it's the highest level of detail that you can receive with these rat these tiles and the same thing applies if you had your own custom base map service we wouldn't show you the term room it would be your actual tiles the actual numerical values if you're if you're working with your own custom base map that has your own custom scales so we would show you a slightly different type of list but you would still have the same type of experience so it's just important to understand what those boxes refer to again if you zoom in further then the extent it's going to give you the visible extent on the map what you see in that map area is what you're gonna get if you zoom in further so now that's kind of that's wanted to show you the differences between those two so now we're gonna kind of move on to some more general offline information I wanted to share with you so this doesn't just this can apply to both the different types of areas that we create cuz these settings called advanced offline settings are applied at the web map level so where I showed you in the very first demo you had that offline section we only went to manage areas the other section above that is dedicated for these types of options right and if you were to go into those options these are the options you would see into that in that menu first so you see you have different you know what basically what these options are is it controls the downloading of your areas which includes synchronization because synchronization is bi-directional so the downloading part of the sync will be affected by these changes again all of them say there were download in the options now the the the main reason why you'd want to use these settings if you wanted to control not only the type the geometry that you get downloaded or the features but also any attachments by default and this is separated out for editable features or read-only features depending on if you have layers in your map that are for editing or for reference you can set these these options independently of those of the editing capabilities so for editable features and these are the defaults what you're seeing right now is the default settings for these options so by default your device will on on the editable feature list you'll see device will download and get updates to features and attachments so what that means is that you're gonna get obviously your features and your attachments any existing attachment you have on your data is going to be downloaded with that offline map now the other thing is that if you were to switch it to the middle option say oh device will download and get updates for features only this is if you only want the features but no existing attachments now the reason why you might want to change some of these settings is not only to increase the speed of the download or the packaging of the project in that case because it doesn't bring a lot of those larger attachments if you have a lot of features you have a lot of attachments and maybe the lope maybe the field worker doesn't need to view existing attachments for other features because they're only working with features they capture and attachments they've captured so they may not need those the third option is device will never download or get updates this is essentially schema only so if you only want like a blank feature layer for example you don't want existing features and you don't want an existing attachments because everything you're gonna be creating is new in the field obviously if you're doing inspections or those types of workflows that option wouldn't be applicable but if you're doing asset collection or asset inventory and you're capturing new features you may not necessarily need existing features around you unless they're there for just for reference so we're going to kind of see a little bit more about how these options work in the app so this is for the editable feature options that I showed you before so now on the very left now this is just some polygon data and some point data that I've downloaded these aren't the same type of data that I generated before this is a different data so you can see features and attachments which is the default setting so if you you know select this polygon you're gonna see that I my attachment that I can I can see right there now in the middle you see features only now it's the exact same map exact same data but I changed it to that middle auction to omit attachments you see I get features only it's the same polygon but I don't have the attachment that got downloaded with it and finally on the right is schema only it's for the same extent but I don't have any of the points or any of the polygons so this is what you're going to see in that in that case and if I were to add features local to the device and synchronize it it would push those up to the server but any edits that were made on on the server side wouldn't get pulled down so they wouldn't get downloaded advice so it only ever be your local edits that you get to see on the map so can help for certain situations okay so now we're gonna switch gears a bit now so with the last two topics we talked we discuss where we're working with map areas and in the different ways you can generate them through the web map or in the app itself for the purposes of taking them offline in the web map now in this case we're working with local base maps to be applied to those offline areas that we've already generated okay so now oftentimes local base Maps is referred to as side loaded base maps which can include files such as tile packages such as TP Ches duplicate X Files and vector tile packages such as VT P K's there's two ways that you can utilize a side loaded base map the first way is you can switch between different base Maps using the base map tool from an open base map either online or offline in this case we're gonna go with offline areas so that means that let's just say that you've downloaded you you've you've authored your web map with an esri basemap in it and so you've already downloaded your offline area that has that as its default base map but you've in the meantime side loaded to a base map that may be using a higher resolution imagery for your area different content different tiling scheme things like that you can switch to it through the base map tool so you can open up that offline area go to the base map tool and then see you're side-loaded basement uploaded and then you can go and your switch to it and use that the second way is applying the side loaded base map as the default base map for that new offline area whereas switching the default is whatever was defined in the web map when you downloaded it whereas the second option says says I have a default that I've applied to my web map but I rather I want to replace that default with one of my local base maps so that's what's referred to as a base map by reference the base member if its workflow now the main reason that someone might want to utilize a side loaded base map as opposed to publishing as a tiled service and downloading it with the offline area is oftentimes due to the size and complexity of these base maps sometimes there are multiple gigs in size or just the extent and level of detail that's required for the the work being done makes more sense to just have it side loaded and using one of the two options to apply it to that map but there could be more other reasons as well this is just kind of more of a common one that I've seen there are multiple methods for side loading base maps on two devices you can do it manually over a USB connection between the device and the PC or Mac if you're using iOS iOS uses iTunes to do the side loading or the second option which is my in my opinion the more preferred option is using a third-party sharing app as I refer to it such as a Google Drive iCloud Drive or maybe bought Dropbox or other types of apps that can allow you to host a file from your machine and access it from a mobile device this is a lot easier it's more accessible to other to a wider array of people and especially your field crew who don't need to physically bring their devices into the office or connect them to a computer to get the base maps on there so it's a little more of a streamlined workflow to get the same files on the device it just needs a way of doing it I want to go back to the switching topic here for a minute in my next bullet point so there are certain requirements if you will for switching to a base map some things that need to be met especially when you're working with offline area so what are some of those requirements to allow you to switch to a map you side-loaded first of all the spatial reference of your default based map that you've defined in your web map when you saved it must match the spatial reference of the local side-loaded base map what would happen if they're different is you would go into the base map tool and you would see that it's listed as unavailable and if you try to switch to it it would say that the special references don't match I'm or something to be able to switch to so in that case we want to make sure that the default base map and the web map has a similar spatial reference as the one you're planning on switching to now the other case is the offline map extent must intersect with the extent of the local base map so if you were for example here in Redlands California if I were to take the extent for this area offline but I wanted to use a base map area for Palm Springs whereas those extents do not overlap it would shows unavailable I can't switch to it so just a few things to kind of be aware of when you when you download these areas some of those also apply to for the basement by reference we're close against I use the same type of side learning base map so it's not just for switching now base my part reference workflow now in my previous slides I showed you the advanced offline options this is in the same section where it says use a top package for the offline base up it's just at the bottom of all those options this is where you can toggle these different options are by default it's the top one I'm looking at the screenshot on the right it says device will use the base map defined by the web map right that's the default setting that is for all the web maps but you can toggle the second option that says device will use a tile package it already has and that package file name box will be empty unless you until you populate it by typing in the name and extension of your local base map obviously so spelling is very important here because it will think it's a different base map and it won't find it so I'm gonna make sure that we typed it spell the name correctly as it is in the file that we side-loaded so kind of show what this experience is so before we get into the to the video here I'm using an iOS device I'm using an iPhone and what I've already done in the back office is I've uploaded the Lyn's tiles tiles all that I've already defined for my web map I've already uploaded that to iCloud Drive so now I'm going to access that file through the files app on iOS and I'm going to move it into the collector folder so that collector has access to it so that's going to be how we're going to access that file and use it so I'm gonna open up files I'm gonna go down to Redlands tiles and download it and then I'm gonna move it I'm gonna select it and move it over to on my iPhone and I'm gonna click collector and say copy now I can get out of files and I can go back into collector because now collector has that file now what's gonna happen I'm gonna go to my web map at offline area and then because it found it I'm gonna pause the video here for a second the base map that we're looking at actually I'll zoom out a little bit in the video this is different data than the data I showed you before for Naperville this is some utility data for the Redlands area and you can see this is my custom Redlands tiles tile package this is not the streets base map that I have set as its default so that's how you can know that I've found it I'm applying my local base map and then all I have to do is click download area and when you click download area and which I'll do here in a moment you'll see that it completes a relatively fast I didn't speed up the video in that case and the 1.3 megabytes is just the features so as I mentioned before this is all in the local geo database that gets created with the features from this extent because I already have the base map local to this device I don't need to download it so the downloading experience typically goes a lot faster in these cases because you don't need to worry about packaging a base map or retrieving the base one which is always larger than the amount of features so that's the nice benefit as well so now what I kind of want to show you here ok is now when using the base umpire reference workflow there's some additional information I wanted to share and some key few key points to highlight as I mentioned before and you can see there's two separate errors here these aren't videos these are just screenshots in this case I mentioned that the naming of the file when you type in the name in the web map settings needs to match I won't find it that's one scenario where you might get the message on the left or it says local based I've done it is that the spelling is mismatched or the top hackage was actually deleted from that device in which case we'll get this message message that says local based map not available this top package was not found on your device the base map will need to be downloaded now what this means if you click cancel it just cancels a download experience if you go to continue then it downloads the the default web map you've set in your web map so it either way won't use the local base map that you had to find but the benefit of using continue is that you're not you're still able to move forward with your data collection workflow for example if you don't have access to the web map in your online account or your enterprise account to be able to either remove that option or to modify the file name or things of that nature you can still continue with your workflow even if it's not the desired base map to use now on the right it's a similar experience as far as the error message but it's generated a different way this means that hey I've found your base map but it does not match the spatial reference of the default base map in my web map again as I mentioned with switching is it applies for basement by reference as well in order to use a side loaded top package of the spatial references you need to match between your default web map base map and your the side loaded tile package or vector tile package or whatever the case is in that case it gives you a similar error message where it says local basement on incompatible the spatial reference of this top package is not compatible with this map the base map will need to be downloaded again clicking continue will download the default base map that you've defined in your web map so definitely some areas to just be aware of just in case you get these error messages and you kind of unsure what they're referring to just kind of wanted to point those out okay so I went through how to create different areas do the web map through the app itself some additional information to be aware of and also how to work with local base maps and some kind of key points to kind of just be aware of I'm gonna pass it on back over to Brent who's gonna wrap things up so thanks Kevin that was a really great overview of all our different methodologies for taking maps offline as well as working with side loaded base maps a really powerful capability let me drill a little bit into the different pros and cons of working with the different methodologies because they all have pros and they all have cons so I think it's important to talk to these so let me talk about the first one what would my packages one pro is that it can be side loaded this is the reason why many people use mobile map packages today you can create a file no matter how big it is it could have your whole GIS with all your offline imagery everything and then you can just slide load it onto the device and then it just shows up in apps like Explorer and Navigator another pros that can have complex data structures like routable networks this is something that isn't available with with map areas one con is the fact that it's static and updates are a full replacement so there's nothing dynamic about this at all it's just a static file that you have on your device that you've downloaded and we well we can detect if an update needs to be made and it's available and update RF is a full replacement so this could take some time if the file structure is relatively large now map areas defined via the app the big Pro here is field worker flexibility field workers can define whatever they want and take it offline you don't need to anticipate where people will be working the other Pro here is that you can define only what you need so you can define an area that's as small as you need and again you have the flexibility to say I just need that I know exactly where I'll be working and I don't need to take it a bit more one con that we're noticing is that has increased load on the server so you can imagine if you had a very large enterprise say a thousand field workers and they also needed to take the same area offline at the same time well every time you define a map area that puts a request to the server to go and package up all that data now if you had a thousand people doing it all at the same time that's going to be putting a lot of load on the server it really takes me to the last methodology which is kind of the opposite of that so map areas must be anticipated that can be a con with defined in the web map but a pro is that it's very simple your field workers don't need to do anything all they need to do is download the area as Kevin showed another major pro our optimizations like Kevin spoke of scheduled updates optimization the Delta workflows so it just pulls down the data changes and not the big heavy base map and everything else so this is a huge bro the other nice thing that I don't mention in the bullets but a web mayor map area is defined in the web map since these are anticipated and created beforehand you can manage some of the scalability of these operations because these are created beforehand you don't have a thousand people requesting the same area at the same time you might have a thousand people wanting to download that area but the big difference here and it's subtle is that that area has already been created so you don't have to execute all those complex queries and package up all that data right now thousand people are just downloading a file and our systems scale much better when you're just downloading a file versus sq ting all this logic to create the area in the first place so I would say out of the three options the map area is defined on the web map is definitely the most sophisticated which in the end leads to the simplest user experience for the end user all we have to do is tap download and then they get it and then they get all the optimizations of sinking and only pulling down the deltas so we're putting a lot of effort into all three of these but I often recommend the third one that Barry's defined in the web map if you're comfortable working with web apps so let's talk a little bit the road ahead for our apps so field apps and offline will always be be a big focus for us because such a key experience and such a key thing that people need to do some things were working on right now are bringing offline capabilities to workforce and that's in beta right now and it's coming and will be released very shortly so here the methodology is project projects are now downloaded before you open them in an opportunistic way and the idea being you're always working on the device so you're always storing your edits to the device and then those edits are being pushed to the backend servers opportunistically when connectivity is established some other things our team is working on is improving a web tool for configuring offline experiences we realize that it can be hard to set these up so we want a very simple to use web tool to make you as successful as possible when configuring offline experiences for your field staff another thing we've heard from you guys is sharing content between our apps so in Kevin's example when he was side loading the base map well wouldn't it be great if all our apps could use the same basement well we're working on that today so you can share that content amongst all our field apps so you only need to sideload at once and everyone gets the latest base map that your organization is using so let's talk about some resources for you I have one big one that we just released and it's the offline implementation guide it's basically this presentation given in a much more personal way so you can read this PDF and I'll walk through all the nuance considerations you should be thinking about when choosing trying to choose a methodology for taking your base maps offline so I'd like to thank you for participating or listening to this session and please ping us with any questions

Channel: Esri Events

Views: 3,435

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Esri, ArcGIS, GIS, Esri Events, Geographic Information System

Id: ZOn_Gs4fE58

Length: 59min 12sec (3552 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 13 2020