Offline area errors

[Nicauldron]

Hi all 

I have been struggling to create offline areas in Fieldmaps for site visits. This is quite important because a lot of the visits done are in remote areas.

A lot of the layers get a "Layer type is not supported" error and a few have "Sync is not enabled" preventing offline mode to be enabled in pretty much all of my maps. 

Are there any common practice tips for preventing these? 
 What kind of layers are supported in offline mode? (I just have normal shapefiles in the maps!)

[KathleenCSki · Accepted solution]

The issue is shape files are not supported. You need hosted feature layers either in ArcGIS Online or in ArcGIS Enterprise. In select the feature, select sharing, share as web layer, complete the metadata, under copy all data: select feature, set group permission for the data, then click over to configuration. Click the edit pencil next to the feature. I usually check everything in this section except the first box as my data is no public. Be sure it is set as editable and sync enabled at a minimum if you are expecting to collect data for the feature.

Please see editable data requirements: Requirements—ArcGIS Field Maps | Documentation

Have fun!

[Nicauldron]

Hi @KathleenCSki 

Thanks for those instructions!

That solved error that was happening, but now the offline areas I draw fail after packaging. There is no explanation for this error. 

This is the error I remember getting previously. Any suggestions to solve this? 

Will I have to test whether a user will be able to create an offline area from the app instead of the desktop version?


*EDIT* I see now there is a separate post dealing with this second error specifically! I'll see if I can find a solution there. 
Solved: Offline Map Area Package Failure - Esri Community

[KathleenCSki]

Hi Nicauldron,

By fail after packaging, do you mean they do package but fail to download? Or that they fail to package? We have experienced the failed to package issue. We have found that there is a hard limit to the number of attachments allowed per feature class of 1500. We have extensive photo attachments and we had to split the offline areas into smaller sizes to stay under this limit. There may be other hard limits that may not be disclosed in documentation that could cause this same issue. When in doubt go for smaller offline areas.

If the issue is failed to download, there could be many reasons for this. Signal strength, band width, other maintenance software being pushed at the same time of the download. We had 30 offline areas prepared for our collection teams. Only 2 of them failed after repeated tries to download them. The users were walked through how to create their own offline areas from the app and managed to get everything they needed before departing for field collection.

-Kathleen