Deploying Electric Joint Use Solution--Documentation?

Question

I deployed the new Electric Joint Use Solution to play with and see if it's something that could work for our organization. 52 separate items were deployed to a folder on AGOL.

I guess I'm a little confused. I haven't ever deployed one of these solutions before. Is there documentation or metadata somewhere that describes the purpose of each item, its schema, relationships, etc? We have existing data that I need to load into the solution feature layers. There are many more fields than we track currently, but it's not clear which ones will be required or used by other items in the solution, what values the fields should take, or how they are intended to be used.

I can give an example. The Pole feature layer contains a field called assettype. The field has no domain applied, does not allow null, and is of short numeric type. What am I supposed to do with that field? How do I map fields in my existing data to it if I have no idea of its purpose? The esri solutions page is very brief and unhelpful. https://doc.arcgis.com/en/arcgis-solutions/latest/reference/introduction-to-electric-joint-use.htm

SepheFox1 · Answer

Thank you for the pointers. I can see the data loading is going to be a big deal. I think I will test with a small dataset to play around first. I'm still a little confused about what fields in the data will need to be filled out in order to make everything work, but I guess I'll figure it out through trial and error.

CassKalinski · Answer

I have not deployed that particular solution, but have deployed two others. Documentation, as you have found, is slim. It has been trial and error, exploring the various components and seeing how they relate. Looking at the content page for the deployed Solution item itself will help. Look at how Esri has grouped the various components. The grouping should make sense in the context of the domain of the solution.

For your Joint Use solution, these all tie into the chart at this link

Essentially, you will have a core set of 1-to-N feature services that feed a network of views, web maps, web apps, and dashboards. (Plus there are some pieces in the Joint Use that I have not seen before.) It takes a little studying and walking through your typical domain workflows, but the groups and pieces will start to make sense. Along those lines, I would suggest you write out user stories than see how they translate to the groupings.

Loading the data to those core feature services is a large mapping exercise. Plan on spending a lot of time on that. I think that Esri has a tool out there to help with the data load (Google search for it), but we built our own ETL scripts in Python.

The dashboards are another area that will need some work. That is not surprising as dashboards are nearly always customized to the particular business needs.