Dissolved hosted feature layer views

[IanPurcell]

Hosted feature layers are fantastic for being able to manage what information is available. Often though, I have to create a dissolved layer in order to create appropriate outlines for a group of counties or show boundaries. It would be really nice if I could create a hosted feature layer that dissolves based on grouped values.

An example use case:
County Council of Government districts are stored as an attribute in a county layer. COG district layer is derived using a dissolve of the county layer using the district attribute. A hosted feature layer would allow the dissolve to update automatically like in SQL Server. The Polygon is used to outline counties in a particular COG district.

[jcarlson]

Hosted view layers are great, but they lack access to more advanced functions like this. It is just SQL under the hood, so spatial operations should theoretically be possible, but who knows if it will ever be implemented.

In the meantime, you could have a Python script dissolve your features and apply them to a separate feature service, then schedule that to run at regular intervals. We do that for a few layers of ours.