What's needed to connect/track mobile devices like iPads or iPhones

[KevinKingrey]

I looking for an example or direction on how to get mobile device location information into the GeoEvent processor.  I've seen "mobile devices" mentioned several times in different presentations but cannot seem to find any examples to illustrate it.  We use iPads in the field and would like to utilize them through the extension.

[RJSunderman]

Kevin --

If you wanted to get mobile device location information for the iPhones / iPads you have out in the field, there are a couple of options.

1)  If you have ArcGIS Online for Organizations, you could use the Collector and
     Operations Dashboard applications Esri developed.

2)  You could develop a native application using the ArcGIS Runtime SDK for iOS
     to broadcast the information to GeoEvent Processor.

The Collector for ArcGIS allows you to collect features in the field and report them back to an ArcGIS Server. One of its other capabilities is to provide periodic location updates on the field devices to update an ArcGIS Online hosted feature service. The GeoEvent Processor could then poll the feature service to obtain new or updated features.

Here are links to the Collector and Operations Dashboard applications:
-  Collector for ArcGIS  http://resources.arcgis.com/en/collector/
-  Operations Dashboard for ArcGIS  http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/arcgisonline/apps/operations-dashboard


If you take the developer route and elect to build your own native application, then you would have a wide variety of options on how the information could be sent directly to GeoEvent Processor. You could have your application open a TCP or UDP Socket and send delimited text (such as CSV) to the socket. You could also format the information as Feature JSON or Generic JSON. Or you could choose to open a web socket (part of the HTML5 standard) and broadcast any of these formats. GeoEvent Processor would then receive the information directly over the socket / web socket.

/RJ