Best practices for building a public-facing dashboard with staff-only data in ArcGIS

[omotuno]

Hello everyone,

I’m supporting an environmental nonprofit that is redeveloping its public-facing water quality dashboard. The goals include:

• Displaying site-specific water quality data on an interactive map

• Allowing the public to download historical data (CSV/spreadsheets)

• Keeping certain datasets and reports private for staff-only use

They currently use Power BI and spreadsheets, but are moving more into ArcGIS and want to expand its role in this project.

Has anyone here built a similar workflow in ArcGIS? Specifically, I’d love to learn about:

• Best practices for balancing public vs. private data in dashboards

• Options for enabling public data downloads while restricting sensitive datasets

• Recommendations or lessons learned from nonprofit/public-facing projects

If you have direct experience with this kind of setup, I’d greatly appreciate your insights and would be happy to connect further.

Thank you in advance,

Olusegun

[DavidSolari]

If you're in ArcGIS Online (or if you're using Enterprise with hosted data) look into Hosted Feature Layer Views, this allows you to lock down what your public users can access vs. your internal staff. If you're using referenced data in Enterprise you'll have to publish two sets of service, one for public use and one for private use. Don't try to be fancy with, say, map-level editing permissions and filters, anyone can take a look at the network traffic and bypass those restrictions to access your private data.

[JonathanMcD]

@omotuno 

Another consideration is to take an approach where you design your data to be "open by default". Granted there will be datasets were you don't want to show operational information or where staff are editing information directly etc. and that's where the Views come into play.

[Nick_Creedon]

If you want to share data publicly in ArcGIS Online, the data dataset has to be shared publicly, which means tables and geometry need to be visible to everyone. 

There are a few ways you can restrict what the public sees.

Create a view layer: Turn Off Editing, remove all Sensitive Fields, and Turn Off Symbology.

If you don't want the geometry public, and you only want to share dashboards publicly. You should look at only publishing a "Table" of the dataset and only sharing the fields you are using in the public dashboard..

I don't think you can create a View Layer of only the Table from a hosted feature service if it has geometry. If the hosted feature service was published with a "Related Table". When creating a View Layer, you should be able to publish that related table as a View Layer.