topic Re: Can you show Flow Direction in Utility Network? in ArcGIS Utility Network Questions

Can you show Flow Direction in Utility Network?

gis_KIWI4 — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 03:21:03 GMT

The problem statement is how do we show the flow of a resource on the map. We could do this in ArcMap with our Geometric Network. I am exploring if UN supports something like this out of the box.

Now just to confirm, my understanding is that FlowDirection introduced in UN v7 will not really help with this. This is more to do with being able to trace "upstream" and "downstream" without subnetwork controllers. This attribute needs to be set manually by the user to guide the trace.

What would be awesome is - updating the subnetwork sets the FlowDirection attribute on the line. This can be then used to visualize the flow.

So, questions -
How to people achieve this right now?
Is there a tool to SET the FlowDirection based on the flow?

https://support.esri.com/en-us/knowledge-base/faq-is-it-possible-to-display-flow-direction-arrows-usi-000024905

Re: Can you show Flow Direction in Utility Network?

RobertKrisher — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 13:57:31 GMT

Setting the direction using the flow direction field does make it easy to symbolize flow direction (which is what sewer/stormwater customers often do), but it introduces a problem whereby every time you update the flow direction you need to validate the network (because it's a network attribute), then update the subnetwork.

The feature is still under consideration, but for the time being you would need to extract the connectivity for the subnetwork and parse the results (with respect to the subnetwork's definition) to determine the flow of each network element (which is finer grained than the feature).

Because this is something typically done by applications that read the utility network topology, there is a developer's being created to demonstrate an approach for how to interpret the flow direction using the JSON file.

Re: Can you show Flow Direction in Utility Network?

gis_KIWI4 — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 19:02:13 GMT

Thanks Robert!
I had a feeling I would need to do this with the subnetwork export!

Re: Can you show Flow Direction in Utility Network?

VeerSingh — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 23:47:40 GMT

Try this out

https://community.esri.com/t5/arcgis-utility-network-questions/digitized-direction-in-utility-network/td-p/1486518

Thanks

Veer

Re: Can you show Flow Direction in Utility Network?

gis_KIWI4 — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 01:58:19 GMT

@VeerSingh - Hi Veer, not quite what I was looking for.

Re: Can you show Flow Direction in Utility Network?

NathanHeickLACSD — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 07:29:02 GMT

Hi Robert,

Is flow direction when using subnetworks not stored anywhere in the network, but is instead calculated dynamically every time it’s needed? Could you get different flow directions from using a different tier with different subnetwork definitions?

Thanks for your help!

Re: Can you show Flow Direction in Utility Network?

RobertKrisher — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 14:54:42 GMT

@NathanHeickLACSD Correct, subnetwork flow direction is calculated every time. This is important, nay required for certain scenarios like cathodic protection. The upstream path to a pressure source vs. the upstream path to a rectifier (or the downstream path to an anode) are going to be different.

Re: Can you show Flow Direction in Utility Network?

NathanHeickLACSD — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 17:07:16 GMT

Thanks @RobertKrisher. Things are becoming much clearer now.

Re: Can you show Flow Direction in Utility Network?

RobertKrisher — Wed, 20 May 2026 13:45:30 GMT

@gis_KIWI4 btw, this feature is now available in ArcGIS Pro 3.7. You'll need to upgrade to ArcGIS Enterprise 12.1 in order to use this with feature services. It does not require upgrading your utility network version.