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Symbolise polygons as points - ArcGIS for Desktop or Collector

Thiru_P

In ArcCollector, our field staff are having difficulty seeing the polygons at regional scale.

So, I thought of symbolising them as point flags (i.e., represent the polygons as points on-the-fly) in ArcMap and publish them as WMS so they will be visible regional scale . I could not do this easily as I could do in QGIS. Tried Representations in ArcMap, without any success.

How do you symbolise polygons as points (centroids ideally but corner points will do sufficient) in ArcMap or ArcCollector.

I have tried ArcGIS Desktop 10.2 and 10.3 to solve this issue unless there is something better in later versions.

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Screenshot 2025-07-02 at 8.03.03 AM.png

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Thiru_P

The long-winded solution that I came up with so far is this:

I have used the Graduated Symbols approach and use Area field and have one symbol to capture from the range (smallest area to largest area polygon) in the layer.

Unable to edit the range manually, I had to create a fake layer that represented a smallest possible polygon and a largest possible polygon and created a symbology layer file and applied it against the real layers.

I would appreciate if anyone has a better solution. Thanks.

Symbolising Polygons as Points using Graduated Symbols

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Thiru_P

The long-winded solution that I came up with so far is this:

I have used the Graduated Symbols approach and use Area field and have one symbol to capture from the range (smallest area to largest area polygon) in the layer.

I would appreciate if anyone has a better solution. Thanks.

Symbolising Polygons as Points using Graduated Symbols

ChristophFederle

As we had the same problem, our approach to display polygons as points in a web map for Collector or FieldMaps in ArcGIS Enterprise/Online:

add the same polygon feature layer to the web twice

for second feature Layer set following options:

return a fixed numerical value via Arcade (e.g. return 25) for this Layer
style with the option „Counts and Amounts (Size)“
hide legend, disable editing and popups
deactivate visibility in the lower scales

we realised, if there is a layer like this in a web map, it is not possible to download this map in field maps for offline work

sblazeycov

Another possible option - I added a really thick outline to the polygon features. When you zoom out they are still fairly noticeable (especially with a bright colour).

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