Building a Data Driven Organization, Part #3: Automate Field Work Orchestration
At the 2021 Esri User Conference a very popular 'track' was ArcGIS Field Maps, if you missed the sessions you can catch up here. Of course there are rich automation capabilities in products like Workflow Manager and solutions from Esri partners but I'm going to show you how to create your own no-code automation that connects external systems with Field Maps using ArcGIS Data Interoperability. The scenario I have in mind is you have an external app that emits data events and you need to send field jobs for each (or selected) event(s). My sample takes 311 service calls coming from a Socrata site that updates hourly, but another source I hear of regularly is Salesforce. There are a large number of web apps that are in scope for Data Interoperability.
First the obligatory screen grabs of live action on my phone showing job receipt and field map response:
An incoming job in Microsoft Teams Mobile:
Field Maps Mobile opened from the map link:
Now I won't repeat the details here but using the pattern I outlined in this preceding post you would set up the automation of job orchestration from your Pro or (preferably) Enterprise environment to run on a schedule.
There are two prerequisites needed for the automation:
- A Field Map with an editable target hosted feature service.
- A Spatial ETL Tool that processes the incoming events and sends jobs.
I recycled the Socrata feed from the post I refer to above for my field map data. The web map having this layer I configured to refresh on a 1 minute interval as we could be working in near real time in the field. The ETL tool is in the blog download but here is a screen shot:
The tool reads the 311 feed (you might be reading anything) and synchronizes the state of the data with a hosted feature service. Then inserted (i.e. new) features each trigger a post to a Microsoft Teams channel webhook (you will have your own business logic on which data events trigger which field map response). I include an email option too, which is disabled in the image above. You might use a number of messaging options available in Data Interoperability. Everything hinges on constructing a map link according to the rules in this topic at the field map links entry.
Full disclosure, this is my first excursion into ArcGIS Field Maps (this may be apparent to veterans). I'll let you read the how-to topic on field map construction and configuration. However, I think I have shown a simple, no-code way to automate field job orchestration which may help you when working with external systems that can be leveraged using ArcGIS Data Interoperability.