Auto Generate a Line from the Users Location to the Nearest Telecom Tower

Question

Hello ESRI Community!

For background, we are using Enterprise 10.9.1 Field Maps.

One of our teams who use our Field Maps daily, and is a critical part of their day-to-day work, asked if there was the ability to have the application generate/draw a line from their gps location (or dropped point) to the nearest telecommunications tower they have to them. We have a layer with these towers in them, and this would be useful for line-of-sight purposes. This auto-generated line would also not have to be recorded in any way.

After looking online, I have not found much on if this is possible. Does anyone know if I can achieve this or have a workaround I could try? Any advice is appreciated. Thank you!

emoreno · Answer

Thanks David. This is a great workaround, and I will discuss this with the team to see what they think despite not being able to see it in the field. I appreciate your response!

DavidSolari · Answer

You can generate these lines database side using Attribute Rules. Use Intersects to get all towers within a given range, loop over the results and use Distance to find which point is closest, then use Geometry to construct a line from the input feature to the closest tower and insert the results into another table.

Unfortunately, this is the inverse of what you want, so you won't get any lines until you submit the location, the lines won't appear in offline areas and you'll have to regularly truncate the feature classes for reference points and lines. Unless someone can post a better hack I think you're out of luck as there's no way to customize the client-side part of Field Maps like you've described. Might be worth an Idea submission!