Scenario:
You download an offline area. You go out into the field, miles and miles away from any service, 2 or 3 hours of driving from the office. You get to where you're going. You collect data. At the end of the day, on your way out, you spot something that needs to be reported. You go to collect it. You are 50 feet outside the bounds of your offline area and still out of service. You can't collect the geometry because, as the app tells you, "The geometry is outside the map area".
(I will note that you can collect a line or polygon provided it has at least one vertex inside the offline area, so clearly it's not a problem of the feature getting cut off, but just of simply not intersecting the area.)
Aftermath:
So, what do I do in this situation? Do I collect it kind of within the offline area and then manually adjust it back in service? Do I go all the way back to the office (3 hours! each way!), redownload a new area, and come back tomorrow? Do I just not collect it at all?
I don't think this is something that the users should have to worry about. We should be able to collect geometry anywhere on the map, even if we can't see anything. Cutting us off from data collection simply because we are out of bounds (our own bounds, that we drew) can very easily lead to situations like the one I described above. As it is, we discovered this limitation just doing an office training exercise last week, and it was enough of a snag to derail that user's lesson.
Idea: Let us just collect anywhere on the map. I don't care if the feature disappears once we sync because it's out of bounds.
I do understand the "well, we don't want you manually placing points if you have no frame of reference" issue with this, but I'd also probably settle to just not be able to manually place points and only do points at device location if it meant I could actually collect data out of bounds.
Please let us collect data offline in offline areas, even if out of bounds.
