Enable trail and route data collection on Collector

[CarlinAndrus]

Collector could be useful for mapping trails, pathways, crew routes, or other line-based features which are created by following the route of a person, bicycle, vehicle or aircraft/drone.  Functionality could be similar to standard GPS data collectors and would be useful on smartphones.

Consider making a line-based location tracking layer available with frequent location capture intervals (1, 2, 5, 10, 30 seconds?).  Ideally the user could start recording a new feature, add attributes (a name for the route, type of route, etc.), and the software would capture the time and elevation or other attributes at every vertex. The default symbology would be especially helpful if the line included direction arrows. The capability could be used for trail mapping, asset data collection, crew management, traffic congestion travel time runs...

[Kylie]

Hi Carlin -- Have you seen the streaming functionality available in Collector today? You can read about it here: Draw a shape—Collector for ArcGIS | ArcGIS. Although that is a link to the Windows help, the same functionality is available on Android and iOS as well. 

Today you can set the streaming interval (how often a point is collected for the line/polygon you are creating). It doesn't keep separate information about each vertex of the line/polygon, but instead a single line or polygon feature is created. Direction arrows aren't used in the symbology today. 

[CarlinAndrus]

Thank you, Kylie. For whatever reason, I wasn’t able to find this functionality when setting up a map in Collector. I contacted Customer Support and they suggested that I post a new idea as I guess they weren’t familiar with the streaming option either or were confusing it with the location tracking capability. Hopefully the idea posting will at least help others find the solution more quickly…

Thanks,

Carlin

[NateM_CWS]

Hi Kylie - Are there any plans to extend this streaming functionality to point layers?  Use cases exist when having the GNSS metadata (e.g. timestamp and accuracy) available for each vertex/point is necessary.

Thanks,

Nate

[Kylie]

Hi Nate -- By streaming of points, do you mean creating new points over regular intervals (similar to how vertices are placed during streaming)? What attribute data would you want captured along with each point? In streaming now, the mobile worker populates the attributes, but if the streaming needed new attributes that frequently I'm not sure that would work.

[NateM_CWS]

Hi Kylie - Yes, I am interested in creating new point features over regular time intervals (e.g. every 1 second).  No attribute data is required to be captured, only the GNSS metadata for each point.  This would essentially be a data logger functionality.  The Tracking Layer in the Location Tracking template does not work for my use case as the maximum collection interval is 30 seconds (I think).  If the maximum collection interval were changed to allow up to one second that would most likely work for my particular use case; however, I did have some problems getting the GNSS metadata to write into my features, but I didn't pursue it due to the time frequency limitation. 

[JasonWolf3]

I would also like to see the streaming of point layers at a 1 second interval, capturing Vertex points that have a timestamp in a field. 

My current workflow involves using a 3rd party GPS App to record GPX points. Our team then has to download these GPX points, convert them using the GPX to Shapefile tool and uploading the shapefile back to the feature class that we use in the field. Lots of backend work just to get point features with Timestamps into an AGOL map.