Use shapefile for Collector Offline Areas

[Anonymous User]

Greetings,

I have been been beginning to support the use of for offline field work. I have a 8-10 inspectors who are responsible for different parts of the state of Utah, I have been trying to allow them to download offline areas as they see fit but i have had some feedback that lead sme to this suggestion.

Some inspectors have reported that they have to constantly change their areas and sometimes have to draw extra large squares just to include one outlining data point. This often causes overlap and downloading of extra data (points, lines, basemaps, etc.)

My suggestion would to be to allow the use of shapefiles or some other geospatial boundary layer to define the limits of the offline download and/or allow for more dynamic polygons for offline areas. using a shapefile would be great because I could give each inspector only their area of responsibility and limit extra data downloads. 

If anyone has any suggestions please let me know. 

Thanks 

[DougMorgenthaler]

Michael Van Hatten‌ thanks for reaching out.  Have you taken a look at using using predefined offline areas that utilize irregular shapes?  As the map owner you can name and define these ahead of time for your inspectors to use.  This blog post outlines how you can take advantage of this to simplify your inspectors tasks and minimize download size.

[Anonymous User]

HI Doug,

Thanks for the response, I cant seem to replicate the blog post steps. When I go to create a offline area I only get an option to draw a box. I am also noticing that the Collector app does not like downloading offline area, particularly anything over 1GB. I am looking into side loading base maps to help with the size but is there is hope for collector being able to handle larger offline areas?

Thanks

[Kylie]

Hi Michael - For irregularly shaped offline areas, the basemap must be an ArcGIS Online hosted tile layer or a tile layer from an ArcGIS Enterprise 10.7 or later portal.

[JohnMDye]

If I might just suggest a name change to the title. I don't think shapefiles are not the files you're looking for. I think you meant Featureclasses. What's the difference? All shapefiles are featureclasses, but not all featureclasses are shapefiles. Actually using a "shapefile" would be a disaster.

Overall though, I get the idea and think it would be useful so +1