This question disregards the fundamentals of geodatabase design and system architecture of ArcGIS feature services... please bear with me.
I'm curious to know if there have been any plans to support feature layers that have multiple geometry types in ArcGIS? I've had a few scenarios recently where this functionality would have been really handy.
Some of the systems we integrate ArcGIS with have spatial data that can be either points, lines or polygons. The classic example are Jobs or Work Orders which can occur at a particular defined location (point), along the stretch of a network (line) or in a general area (polygons). No matter the geometry type, the database table has the same schema. We typically export and work with a GeoJSON file out of these systems which supports mixed geometry types.
However, when importing mixed geometry types into ArcGIS, a single table can turn into 3 different tables. This has various downsides when using them in ArcGIS Web Apps including having to manage multiple map layers (layer visibility, labels etc) and being unable to set up filter or analysis tools that work across all features in all of the 3 separate layers at once.
Simply put, we would like to see all features in a single table/layer, whether they are points lines or polygons. Crazy, or not crazy?
