Auto-correcting child point location to match parent point location

Question

Hi Field Mappers,

We (data office people) are having an issue where the field team (Field Maps front end users) are placing check points too far from the actual device locations.

Other than asking the field team to please zoom in a lot more and/or increasing the size of the symbology are there any methods for auto-correcting the snapping of child points to parent points at run-time?

Two things I've thought of and hoping someone here might have a better idea or have done it before.

1. Create two new fields that the xy from the parent point get carried over into in the child point via arcade and then remove the existing geometry of these points and put in the new ones in an overnight FME process

2. In an FME overnight process run a find nearestneighbour or buffer to grab the xy from the nearest parent point and put that into child's geometry

It would be really cool if there was something in Field Maps via arcade that could do this at run-time or a stronger snapping tolerance?

Any pointers appreciated.

elpinguino · Answer

Thank you both for your replies. I have left off some context info that would have been useful at the start! I have a relationship set up between the device point and check point. Because the field team wanted to minimise the number of steps or button presses they take we opted to add check points in directly (not the normal workflow of tap on device location and then "add record". So I set up an arcade expression to pick up the GlobalID of the nearest parent point and write that into the child check point GUID. This worked for a while an then about 6 months - 1 year ago? a bug appeared, and this arcade expression no longer works. Arcade cannot be calculated into a GUID field.

So back to the original problem. We are trying to get the check point to snap to the device point. Based off of what's been suggested so far I think I'll go back to the team and suggest we go back to normal workflow most ESRI field workers take although it will require them to take one or two more button pushes.

DavidTipping-Jsy · Answer

Hi @LeeButler - If I'm understanding your workflow correctly there is an old but fantastic series of tutorial videos relating the hydrants and inspections that may help or at least offer ideas. Check out video 1of 6  starting here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0W6X6ovi_Q

elpinguino · Answer

Hi @LeeButler , Thanks for your reply. The field team like being able to visually see that the check point has been placed if that makes sense? That's why both the parent and child are spatial. And if we keep the child spatial it's easier to have the data flow into heat maps in dashboards. If the children were in a table would there be a way to automatically extract types of species catches from child records into a heat map?.. Maybe  featuresetbyid? Right now I'm just thinking off the top of my head.