Dynamic feature clustering is one of the most promising parts of ArcGIS. But it's being held back from it's full potential. My proposal is to make feature clustering more powerful with a single, powerful change:
Allow users to add summary fields based on concatenation of values.
If that sounds like gibberish (or you don't see why that's so game-changing), hear me out.
Imagine you're making a map of tourist sites in a European city. You eventually want to publish your map online, so annotations aren't an option. Your problem is that all the sites in the center city keep overlapping each other and making the map unreadable. Clustering sounds like it would help clean up your map, but it actually does a terrible job at it. When you turn on clustering, the map does look cleaner. But now you only see the labels for the sites in the suburbs. To see the sites in the center city, users have to zoom in super close. This makes it difficult to see at a glance where a particular point is.
Essentially, clustering does a good job of "showing you the big picture" when dealing with data. It's much less useful as a cartographic tool for cleaning up a map. But it could be.
When you turn on feature clustering in ArcGIS Pro, the resultant clusters automatically have an ObjectID and a point count. There's a way to add additional fields to the cluster by right clicking on cluster in the contents pane and going to properties (see image):
Right now, unless the field you want to add is numerical, the only way you're allowed to join the fields is by "Mode". But if Pro starts allowing fields to be summarized by concatenating the values in a field, it would unlock all sorts of new possibilities. If you can label a cluster based on the names of features being clustered there, you could label clusters of facilities like the NPS does, dynamically.
Anyways, that's just my idea. Maybe the Esri engineers are worried people would try to concatenate data from a cluster with 10,000 features and break the labelling engine lol.
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