I would like the ability to publish feature class annotations as hosted feature layers (I can’t be the only one with this request).
I work for a local water utility company and have been tasked with migrating our infrastructure from AutoCAD to ArcGIS Pro. The utility manages approximately 5,000 miles of water mains, serving 16,500 water connections and 1,000 sewer connections, across 18 counties—an area roughly the size of the state of Connecticut. Much of this system was built before GPS was commonly used, so about 85% of it is documented with as-built notes, which are critically important.
To date, I’ve converted over 215,000 annotations into tile layers hosted on Esri’s servers, which I pay credits to store and access. While this solution works, it’s far from ideal. First, we're incurring ongoing costs to store and retrieve these tiles. Second, when new GPS data is collected for previously undocumented areas, I can't go in and remove the corresponding as-built notes from the tile layers.
Another common workflow among utilities is to store a .JPEG image within a line or point feature to reference as-built notes. The problem with this approach is that it breaks the spatial experience. When you leave Field Maps—where users have aerial basemaps and real-time location awareness—and open a static image, you lose your spatial context and physical location reference.
Unfortunately (or fortunately), I’ve spoiled our field technicians by integrating as-builts directly into the map, and there’s no turning back now.
Lastly, I find it puzzling that Esri can publish map text such as city and road names without issue, yet publishing user-generated annotation as feature layers is not supported.
I've logged a handful of bugs and finally an enhancement for this ENH-000124109.
I hope you'll consider this.
