Vector Tile Packages and Survey123

[PeterTimmers]

Wishful thinking, but vector tile packages would be very useful in Survey123 (and of course Collector).   Probably still a long way off, but has there been any thoughts from ESRI on this? 

We have a large area of cover for our Damage Assessments and are never able to build tile packages that can cover our whole state.  Last time I tried I had limited scale coverage and it was still >100GB.

Vector tile packages would be quicker to generate and much smaller right?

Cheers

[JoeFlannery]

Peter:

Have you seen this GeoNet - Survey123 posting?

https://community.esri.com/groups/survey123/blog/2016/01/06/prepare-basemaps-for-offline-use 

[PeterTimmers]

So it's foreseeable that the mobile workers will get a DIY offline basemap creation like Collector??  

If nothing else, that will tick the box for the ongoing sticking point with our guys, if it's a future feature.

[JamesTedrick]

Hi Peter,

At this point, we are still looking at the survey author defining the offline basemap; would you mind detailing what the sticking points with that authoring workflow is when compared to the survey author defining the offline areas?

[PeterTimmers]

Our users are likely to use Survey123 anywhere in the world with very little notice.

Even our every day use covers the whole of Queensland, Australia, so there is no way we can build offline tpks that cover the entire area.

The Collector workflow has worked with our mobile workers, where they know to download an area before heading out.  They're mapping fires from aircraft and it can be in an unpopulated area miles from any town.

Survey123 Damage Assessment will be for urban or semi-rural areas with a possibility of the mobile network being damaged or not working.  They are sometimes deployed overseas (within 24hrs) where we will not have any mapping besides what is available from ESRI Inc.  

[DougBrowning]

have you looked to see if collector lets you see downloaded areas as a tpk in the file system?  If so you could point Survey123 to it in settings.  That is what I do for my custom app - but all our tpks are prebuilt.

[ShanonLoughton]

+1 vector tile maps for Survey123 (and Collector)  - our needs are the same as Peter Timmers‌ but for the Northern Territory of Australia ~1.4 million km²

[JamesTedrick · Accepted solution]

Hi Peter,

We've had this enhancement pop up before; it's on our longer term plans to provide support for vector tiles in our apps.  One of the hold ups is that the SDKs that our applications use have only recently received support for vector tiles themselves.

[ShanonLoughton]

Hi James
Any update on this please? Is it a big change ala Collector needing a new Collector Aurora or is it more priority of features?

cheers
Shanon

[JamesTedrick]

Hi Shanon,

Vector tile support is a feature that requires a fair amount of work to develop and implement - as Survey123 currently does not use the ArcGIS Runtime (which is where Collector, Explorer and other ArcGIS mobile applications derive their support for them), either a change to use the ArcGIS Runtime or an alternative implementation pattern would need to be implemented.