Sign Collection and ArcGIS Mobile

[SimonMorgan]

My organization is about to embark on a major sign collection.I was just wondering how other have handled this. Our plan to is to use ArcGIS Mobile due to its low cost deployment.

We have a need to know how many of each kind of sign we have. How do others handle multiple signs on the samepost. Do you do multiple fields, sign1, sign2 etc or have you found another workflow?

Ideally I would use related table, the main FC would be the post and a related table for the signs on the post. But AGM can't currently edit related tables out of the box.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

[NicholasGross]

We have recently completed our sign inventory and relationship classes would have been so very useful. Unfortunately Mobile (even the newest 3.0) still forces you into bad database practices, but I guess we have to use what we have.

Because you never really know how many signs will be on a post, implementing multiple fields would be difficult. We used a field in the sign feature class that held a post ID (just a simple incremental number), so every record that had a matching post ID, we knew to be on the same post. The challenge is making sure that the same ID isn't reused by accident. If you have multiple crews in the field, you'll probably want to start each crew at a different number so they don't overlap (ie. crew 1 starts at 1, crew 2 at 501, etc.) We then had to transform this one sign feature class into our production database that uses a pole feature class and sign table (which is, ironically, the setup in the Esri local government data model that is not supported by Mobile...).

It worked for us, but there may be better ideas out there.

[O_FallonMapsandApps]

We completed a major sign collection project last summer.  We were forced to use ArcPad because of using related tables - poles as the spatial feature with signs and inspections as related tables to poles as well as inspections being a related table to signs.  We handled unique ID issues by having about 15,000 sequentially numbered labels with press out date fields and other information which we attached for inventory ID to the signs and poles and recorded all this in our field edit.  It took a couple months of planning with several project revisions to get it up and rolling the way we wanted but we were able to get all of our poles and associated signs inspected and collected over the summer.

We used ArcGIS Mobile exclusively the previous summer and it made the data flow process go so much smoother but it isn't yet able to handle related tables.  Good luck.