View connecting floors between buildings

[DougSims_GT]

We have a few buildings that connect to each other internally. There are also a couple of buildings that have unique building numbers, but are essentially the same interior building. 

How is everyone handling these use cases? 

I'd like to have a way to show that floor 2 in building 95 connects to floor 3 of building 85, but I don't see how to do that using the floor filter since it only looks at a single room at a time. 

For a single building with unique building codes, do you just use a "dummy" code for that building? i.e. Building 29 for the units/levels of buildings 29A, 29B, and 29C, 

Or is there another way to handle these instances that I haven't thought of? 

[MollyE]

I've seen a few ways around this, depending on what the end use is. In Pro, they now how the option to change the floor across a whole site rather than facility, which I believe goes off the vertical order field instead. But that is only in Pro and does not yet work with online maps/apps.

The way we handled this was by creating an "alt" levels layer and field, and an "alt" facilities layer. The layer is set up the same as our original level layer, but rather than having IDs like RRC_1000.LV1, RRC_2000.LV1, etc it is RRC_ALL.LV1 and the alt level field corresponds to that. We mostly use this in dashboards which do not have Floor Filter widgets, but if you were to use the floor filter widget, you would set the facilities and floor to your "alt" layers and floor field in your units/details layers to your "alt_level_id" field (or whatever you decide to call it) rather just the "level_id".

Here are some screenshots of the attribute tables to help make sense of that.
Alt Levels layer:

Alt Facilities layer:

Units layer (original layer, just added the alt fields):

[DougSims_GT]

I've thought about doing this, so it's good to know that this is a functional solution. 

"In Pro, they now how the option to change the floor across a whole site rather than facility,"

Where is this option? I don't think I've seen that in Pro.

I know I've seen in online maps a way to filter all buildings by floor, but I wasn't sure if that was a standard widget/option that was available or just a custom tool that someone built. 

The current plan is to have the vertical order line up for all of our buildings (order zero being the floor you enter the main level on), but if you can't filter by that, then I don't know if it even matters. We also have cases where a building has entrances on 2 different floors, and connections to other buildings on different levels. Aligning the vertical order fields is the only way I know to keep that straight. Do you base your alt-field levels on the vertical order field? 

It looks like the alt-level fields are going to be the only feasible solution for a some of the maps I publish. 

[MollyE]

The multifacility floor filtering was released in 3.5, so you'll need the most up to date version of pro. It adds a couple buttons to the floor filter widget to choose between single or multi facility filtering.

We also have some buildings with entrances on different levels, so we also have our vertical order start at 0 for the lowest ground level. So anything with vert order 0 is Floor 1 with an alt level id of RRC_ALL.LV1, vert order 2 is Floor 1 with an alt level id of RRC_ALL.LV2, etc. We only have one building with a level below that so the vert order is -1 and is labeled "Basement" with an alt level id of NRG_ALL.LV0

You could also potentially get around creating new layers by messing around with the filter widget (the regular filter, not the floor filter) in apps like Experience Builder and filtering via the vertical order or level number fields. 

[AnninaHirschiWyss]

Hi Molly, thanks for sharing! This looks like an interesting solution which I have to check out. Do you also use wayfinding/IPS ? Would you have to use the "alt" fields there too?

Best,

Annina

[MollyE]

We are working on setting that up right now actually. We have kind of gone back and forth with that idea but we ultimately decided to just use the default floor filtering layers/fields. A majority of our sites have disconnected facilities so they don't necessarily benefit from changing levels simultaneously from a wayfinding prospective.

[AnninaHirschiWyss]

Hey Dough and Molly,

Glad to see someone else facing the same challenges 🙂 We even have a building on top of another one connected with stairs and elevators... So yes, yes and yes: filter by vertical order throughout the campus (site) is a must.

I think Esri is aware of these use cases, but did so far not provide a suitable solution supported by all apps. The most close to fit our needs came the mobile app version 1, but they changed the floor filter in V2 to look more like the Web/Kiosk/Field Maps.

See also these ideas/posts: https://community.esri.com/t5/arcgis-indoors-ideas/arcgis-indoors-allow-customization-of-floor/idc-p...