Auto-Populate an Address Field in Collector

[JonathanMason]

It would be beneficial for us to be able to create a new point in Collector and automatically have that point populate a field with the nearest address. This would cut down on the number of typos and mistakes we see from our field crews when manually typing an address.

An alternative would be a "Capture Address" button that would record the nearest address into whichever text field is selected.

[JohnDye]

Your addresses might be standardized with this kind of functionality, but accurate, I'm not so sure. Latitude and Longitude are still your most accurate indicator of location. Geocoding is an imperfect science. Esri does a great job, but man it is really hard and never 100%.

If you're really after this kind of functionality, you could write an SOI to automatically geocode a feature when it is created and write the address values into some fields in your service. Therein lies another problem with your request, Esri would need to make a lot of assumptions about your data schema in order to facilitate this. What fields do you want them to write the address into? I'd bet the way you organize your address fields is slightly different from the way the next customer organizes theirs. Also, where would you want to configure kind of capability? On the layer? Which Geocoding Service would you want to use? Esri's World Geocoding Service? Do you want to use your own Geocoding Service? It's not possible to add new fields to an existing service, your fields have to already exist. So which fields do you want the addresses written into? How do you want the address components parsed? Do you want them parsed at all? So many big challenges with this. It's not as simple as you think.

[SimonJackson]

Has anyone built a python script to automate reverse geocoding new points collected from Collector (or any app really)?

I saw the Crowdsource web app template has this logic built into it (reverse geocodes the points created from the uploaded photos, and includes the address information in the attributes)

Thinking this could be setup as a scheduled task and run every hour to update any new records (using perhaps a boolean field or editor timestamp) with address information from the World Geocode Service.  The field user might not see this info when collecting data, but the records will be enriched for viewing in the back-office or field users looking at existing features.

[RichardvBailey]

I know this post a little old but wondering if there's been any luck with auto-populating an address into a point feature using Collector? I'd also like to auto-populate a field based on a field from a different layer.. e.g. populate the neighborhood name field of a utility pole point placed in Collector based on the name attribute of a neighborhood polygon feature class layer in the map. Both are available as "attribute actions" of the Smart Editor widget in WAB and would be great additions to Collector. 

[CharmaleeSandanayake1]

I assumed this was available on Field Maps by now but looks like that is not the case from this link: https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/arcgis-online/mapping/from-the-smart-editor-to-smart-forms...

It says 'Reverse Geocoding is not yet available using Calculated expressions in Smart Forms.'

This functionality would be hugely beneficial to our field staff collecting tree information.