Creating an offline sketch polygon map area does not work

doronwen

I'm trying to create offline maps for field crews in an area with no reception.

The area I'm trying to capture is not a perfect rectangular (I'm capturing areas around roads, linear events), so I'm using the "Sketch polygon map area" option to capture my area. 

But each time the results (the offline map) come back as a rectangular shape, with 4 vertices, and not the original shape I drew on the map. See images below.

It appears that the tool picks 4 vertices from the odd rectangular shape I created and extrapolate it to a 4-corner rectangular. 

Is this a bug in Field Maps? Or am I doing something wrong? I'm on enterprise 11.1

  

 

KerriRasmussen

@doronwen 

You’re very welcome, happy to help. As for your question about cropping the basemap, the tool is “cropping” or reducing the number of tiles included in the package, but in a slightly different way. If I were to create the same area using the rectangle tool verses the sketch polygon tool, the offline area using the sketch polygon tool will be smaller. However, instead of clipping the tiles to the outside of the polygon sketch area, whole tiles that intersect with the polygon at all levels of details are packaged. As you zoom into the map, the areas within the polygon sketch area will have more levels of detail downloaded, showing a clear imagery basemap, while the tiles outside will be more pixilated. The example below shows the areas in the polygon on the right and outside the polygon on the left.

I did check the documentation and we don’t go into much detail on raster/vector tile layers, but I will be recommending an update to make the distinction clearer.

As for adding to the Ideas section, I am a strong advocate for customers adding ideas to the page. However, since the reason for the current functionality has to do with performance, it would seem unlikely for the change to happen. Clipping the tiles required a lot more work on the server side, which slows performance.