Add Multiple Related Records

3198
14
03-15-2018 05:15 AM
SteveLane
New Contributor II

Hey All-

I work for a company that does a lot of field inspections, and one of the Achilles heels of AGOL/WebApp Builder "out of the box" has been that inspection records in a related table must be added individually. Or they can be added en masse to a related table by a relatively cumbersome process of exporting a table of inspections to be completed, editing that table, and then appending that table to the live feature service (not much of a time saver). 

What I would LOVE to see is a widget in WAB that, similar to the batch attribute editor, allowed you to ADD a related record to multiple features in one fell swoop. In other words, if a hydrant flushing crew flushed 100 hydrants this week, it would be fantastic to be able to highlight those 100 hydrants, and then add a related maintenance record (with identical field values) to each with a few clicks that denotes they were flushed, without having to visit each point and add the same related data to each. I'd be happy to hear someone say this functionality already exists and I've just missed it somewhere in the last update cycle (PLEASE!), but I'm pretty sure it doesn't.

I'm not a programmer (enough python and SQL to be dangerous to myself and others), and we don't run server (I'm sure this is fairly common in the community). I'm sure there's a way to program your way out of this issue with database triggers and custom widgets, but it's probably out of my and many others league(s) for right now. I think this would be a VERY popular widget in the field-data collection and management community, so any info on plans for such a thing would be appreciated.

Cheers

14 Replies
AlixVezina
Esri Regular Contributor

Also, here's an occasion to provide feedback! Please feel free to fill out the survey shared in this blog post: https://community.esri.com/community/geonet-lounge/blog/2020/09/24/painting-the-forest 

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KellyArmstrong
Occasional Contributor II

Any updates to this?  I was given different info from ESRI Chat help about an enhancement coming to AGOL, that would have a batch related records widget?  ENH-000131175 

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KevinMacLeodCAI
Occasional Contributor II

There are a vast number of very large Esri clients heavily leveraging in WebApp Builder. It is a brilliant product and reached a great level of power last few years. Experience Builder may take a few years to reach feature parity with WAB I think and more importantly, I think its end user interface is harder to understand.  It is similar to Pro. In Pro, many things take more clicks than ArcMap and then there is the Ribbon. However, I am fine with it. No problem. As power users and GIS professionals, we can still get things done. But for the end user, it is a higher bar. User Interfaces must be 1) discoverable and easy 2) fast 3) reliable. These are things I've just noticed through teaching hundreds of users. WebApp Builder has achieved all these.  With one exception of the layer list not having grouping and intuitive on/off. However the Exp Builder layer list is a step back. It should use the Group Layers custom WAB widget which has red/green On/Off switches and supports groups. And have partial checkbox.  White text on dark background is lower readability and all-white all-flat icons like in Win 10 look neat but are harder to see and understand. I always added color to my WAB toolbar icons and a CSS on-hover when they are moused over to highlight them. WAB is easy to customize, and fix things like adding moving popups.  All this to say... I'd consider adding this to WAB.  The amount of large customers using WAB for very important production sites supports it.  While Exp Builder is still new I would encourage user focus group testing on the interface and/or making it more like WebApp Builder which by now is so popular everyday folks have probably seen it and are familiar with it.  This batch editing Idea would be great to see in WebApp Builder.

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AlexandraRutherford
New Contributor

Any update to this? I too need this functionality or another way to batch add inspection records to a related table. 

AllisonKampbell
New Contributor III

I would so love this functionality.  Many uses in utility maintenance for sanitary, storm, and water.  My field staff find it so cumbersome to have to select individual pipes to apply a cleaning record.