Overall Workflow Goal: Our Gas Utility business partners need a digital Gas Leak Survey workflow to meet regulatory requirements and demonstrate full coverage of assigned survey areas. As part of this workflow, we want to enable geofence‑based location tracking in Field Maps so that location tracking automatically turns on and off based on the attributes of the geofence polygon a user enters.
Requested Enhancement: I am requesting that Arcade version 1.31 be made available in ArcGIS Enterprise Portal 11.5 so that the Geofence Arcade expression can use the GetUser() function introduced in Arcade 1.31. This function is required to evaluate whether the logged‑in user matches the esritask_assignee attribute of the geofence polygon, allowing tracking to activate only when the correct user enters their assigned area. The functionality already exists in the geotrigger, but because it isn’t running the updated Arcade version, the expression can’t be saved.
Who Is Affected and Why It Matters: Field technicians, supervisors, compliance teams, and IT are all impacted by the absence of this capability. Without automated, criteria‑based tracking, technicians must manually enable and disable location tracking, which introduces risk of human error and potential data loss. Compliance teams depend on accurate breadcrumb trails to verify that all required areas were surveyed and to provide documentation to regulatory agencies. Our IT team would also need to build and maintain complex post‑processing logic to handle cases where field users don’t follow the manual tracking steps correctly.
Cost of Not Having the Feature: Without automated geofence‑controlled tracking, several inefficiencies occur:
- Excess post‑processing is required to remove extraneous breadcrumb trails when users forget to turn tracking off or leave it on outside their assigned polygons.
- Inconsistent tracking data increases the difficulty of demonstrating regulatory compliance.
- There are also user trust concerns. If tracking can’t be limited to their assigned polygons, some field users may feel they’re being monitored outside of their work areas.
Scale and Frequency of Impact: This workflow will be used across multiple Gas Leak Survey types and affects all field users in our 12 Districts. The issue would occur daily, as technicians frequently move between assigned and unassigned areas and must manually manage tracking.
Industry Context: As a Gas Utility, our goal in using GIS is to ensure safe operations, meet regulatory requirements, and maintain accurate, defensible records of field activity. Automated, attribute‑driven geofence tracking directly supports these objectives by improving data quality, reducing manual effort, and strengthening compliance documentation.
