Spatial Reference in Mobile

Question

Using ArcGIS Mobile it seems that all map services in your mobile project have to have the same spatial reference. There is no ability to project on the fly and still do edits. All of our data is in custom UTM projection.

If we create a mobile project with all of our data then we are unable to use any data from ArcGIS.com as it is in a different spatial reference.

We can project our data on the fly in ArcMap to the GCS_WGS_1984 spatial reference used by ArcGIS.com by changing the spatial reference on the data frame. When we do this the data will display but if we make any edits, the "Post Data" will fail with an "invalid protocol" message.

It seems like one of the big advantages of Mobile and map services is that you can consume data from a wide number of sources. The caveat on this is that the underlying data has to all be natively stored in the same spatial reference, which seems pretty unlikely.

Hopefully I'm missing something but this seems to be the case. This limits the usefulness of ArcGIS mobile and seems like an oversight to me.

MarkSmith1 · Answer

Using ArcGIS Mobile it seems that all map services in your mobile project have to have the same spatial reference. There is no ability to project on the fly and still do edits. All of our data is in custom UTM projection.

If we create a mobile project with all of our data then we are unable to use any data from ArcGIS.com as it is in a different spatial reference.

We can project our data on the fly in ArcMap to the GCS_WGS_1984 spatial reference used by ArcGIS.com by changing the spatial reference on the data frame. When we do this the data will display but if we make any edits, the "Post Data" will fail with an "invalid protocol" message.

It seems like one of the big advantages of Mobile and map services is that you can consume data from a wide number of sources. The caveat on this is that the underlying data has to all be natively stored in the same spatial reference, which seems pretty unlikely.

Hopefully I'm missing something but this seems to be the case. This limits the usefulness of ArcGIS mobile and seems like an oversight to me.

I couldn't agree more. I'm just trying out ArcGIS Mobile for the first time and my operational data is in GCS NAD83 CSRS and I can't overlay it with an ArcGIS Online imagery or topo service. This is insane. I don't want to have to introduce re-projecting my data into this workflow! Guess I'll stick with the iOS app and hope that disconnected editing/caching is on it's way soon.

AkhilParujanwala · Answer

I don't think this is exactly what your looking for, but more of a process that I take to do projections on the fly.

Yes, I use the ArcGIS online imagery (in a connected mobile environment). Yes, my data collection is using the same projection as the imagery. This allows me to create a mobile project and deploy it to devices.

Natively the ArcGIS Mobile application won't read in the X and Y (Long/Lat) coordinates into fields.

The problem with the Imgary is that the projection does not allow for Geometry Calculations in ArcMap. So what I do, is change the dataframe projection to something that will allow me to quickly calculate X and Y coordinates, it posts those changes to the database anyways and then close the mxd and do NOT save.

So that how I modify projections and still keep the mobile project working fine.

I hope this gives some insight as to how you may want to solve your problems.

Thanks,

Akhil P.

MelindaFrost · Answer

As far as I know the answer is no- it all has to be the same coordinate system. I had these application that need to convert between several coordinate systems and I used Corpscon free dll libraries. I go into some more detail about it on this thread:
http://forums.arcgis.com/threads/12959-code-to-convert-xy-coordinates-to-lat-long