SSP Client Spotlight: Our Field Trip to IREA

The Electric Asset Locator in ArcGIS Online

June 6, 2014 — Skye Perry

Esri’s electric and gas team just released two new locator models for our use in ArcGIS Online WebMaps. We had previously posted on a cool way you could perform asset searches in ArcGIS Online via enablement in ArcGIS Explorer (the old explorer, not the new one!).

But Esri is now retiring the usage of the old explorer and it is no longer accessible directly from within your ArcGIS Online account:
Open WebMap

But now, we have an even better approach for searching our asset records. Today I am focusing on the Electric Asset Locator but the same pattern is available for the Gas Asset Locator. In both cases Esri provides us with a download of an example geodatabase (electric and gas respectively) along with the SingleFieldAssetLocator.tbx which is an ArcCatalog Toolbox that will allow you to easily create single field locators off of your asset data.

I did a quick test on the example geodatabase provided by Esri but then jumped right onto trying this out with a customer’s data. Here are the steps I followed to get this working.

First create the individual single field locators:

  1. Unzipped the SingleFieldAssetLocator.tbx to a folder I could access in ArcCatalog:
    Locator Toolbox
  2. Note that there are two toolbox tools in the tbx file – Electric Asset Locator (a geoprocessing script that will batch-create multiple asset locators in one run) and the Single Field Asset Locator (the toolbox to create a single field locator for a single table).
  3. I elected to just use the Single Field Asset Locator to manually create individual locators off of various feature classes. Double-clicking shows you a standard toolbox window.
    Single Field Asset Locator
  4. Select a feature class from your existing enterprise geodatabase.
  5. Type in the unique id field (the single field to search the feature class with, note the drop down doesn’t work; you’ll have to type it in).
  6. Enter a feature label that will be shown when a match is found against the feature class.
  7. And enter an address location – this could be in your geodatabase OR just the local file structure (in my example I am saving the substation locator to the local file system).
  8. The tool should complete successfully. Repeat these steps for your other feature classes (sorry – no related tables supported at this time). When you are done you should have a folder full of your single field locators:
    Single Field Locators

Your next step is to create a composite locator based off of the individual locators you created above. To do this, double-click the Create Composite Address Locator tool in your ArcToolbox under Geocoding Tools:
Composite Locator Toolbox

Use the top section to select and add all of your individual locators and be sure to enter a unique name for the output composite locator at the bottom:
Build Composite Locator

Once the composite locator has been created, just right-click it in ArcCatalog and share it out to your (hopefully existing) ArcGIS Server instance (you can accept the default publishing options):
Share Locator via ArcGIS Server

The publishing process will warn you that it will copy the data to the server, but don’t worry, it’s only copying the locators themselves, not the underlying data. This assumes you already have the core geodatabase registered with the ArcGIS Server.

Now simply grab the REST endpoint for your custom locator from the ArcGIS Server (similar to http://ags.sspinnovations.com/arcgis/rest/services/Locators/CompositeLocator/GeocodeServer) and enter it into your ArcGIS Online organization under My Organization –> Edit Settings –> Utility Services –> Add Geocoder:
Add Geocoder to AGOL

Be sure to click SAVE after you add the locator (it tends to be off the screen at the bottom and is easy to miss)! By simply adding the locator to your organizational account, you will now be able to search on the asset numbers within your WebMaps. The ArcGIS.com WebMaps will now show a drop-down in the search box:
Custom Geocoder

Enter an asset number and you will be taken to that location on the map and shown a handy label indicating which layer was matched against (per the labels you added to your individual locators):
Asset Locator Results

While the browser WebMaps will allow you to select which locator/geocoder to use, the same is not true if you want to use the custom geocoder in Collector for ArcGIS. Collector will only utilize the default geocoder service for your ArcGIS Online organization.

To search assets in Collector, simply make the new custom geocoder service the top service in your config settings (and remember to SAVE). Then open the map in Collector on your device and you can search the asset numbers against it:
Asset Search on Droid

If you read many of my posts, you know I use mostly iOS… but the picture above is from an Android phone (thanks to Chalmer Donahue for letting me borrow his phone).

When testing, I was able to confirm that this worked great on Android devices but it is not working quite yet on iOS. I have reported this bug to Esri and can update you all on any responses if you are interested. I am currently seeing that it just doesn’t find ANY matches on iOS whereas Android finds the match right away with the same exact search off the same geocode service.

Well, this was intended to be a quick article and it grew significantly. Check this new functionality out – it’s very useful for making your assets available in ArcGIS Online! And let us know if you have questions or comments!

We Wrote the Book

The Indispensible Guide to ArcGIS Online

Download It for Free
Chairman of the Board

4 comments

  • When publishing the locators you state that only the locators are copied to the server … this assumes you already have core geodatabase registered with the ArcGIS AServer …

    Can you expand, I’m not familiar with “registering” a GDB with ArcGIS Server (I’ll Google it after sending).

    Also have another related question:

    Can you describe the process of accessing data stored locally and accessed via VPN and Collector, Collector doesn’t seem to provide for access other than from “My Organization” and “On Device”

    • Hi Neal,

      For adding your ArcGIS data to ArcGIS server we absolutely recommend creating a dedicated user to your DB for your web services. So you would then create a new SDE connection in ArcCatalog using that user with a saved password. That SDE file can then be uploaded right into the ArcGIS Server data connections panel… here is a link that describes this in more detail:

      http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.2/index.html#//015400000504000000

      On your related question, Collector will start off as a connected application to a WebMap defined within your ArcGIS Online or Portal. Be aware that if you intend to use Collector disconnected, it only supports certain types of services (feature services and tiled map services). That data is typically hosted by either ArcGIS Server or ArcGIS Online. That allows you to use Collector in a connected mode or a disconnected mode. Then when you take that data offline the feature service and tiled basemap are cached locally but only for the defined area. There are some fine points in this process… might be a good project 🙂

      There is some more good info on the service types and offline access here: http://sspinnovations.com/blog/2014/05/08/our-first-look-offline-access-collector-arcgis#.VIcXvHtFZCo

      Hope this info helps… give us shout if you need some official help!

  • Do you know if there is a way to restrict the users within the organization that can search for the data added?

    Like what if you put a lock from the server manager and add a password to the service, how would that work when using the geocoder? I haven’t work with geocode services so I don’t even know if you can secure a geocode service that way.

    Thanks.

    • SSP Innovations says:

      You typically wouldn’t want to limit access to the search because when used with the mobile apps, the top locator is the only one available. So if you limited it, folks in the field would not be able to search at all.

      You can add ArcGIS Server security to the geocode service on ArcGIS Server and in fact, we often do that. BUT you typically want to wrap that into a hosted service item within ArcGIS Online with the password stored – again allowing ALL users to access the search.

What do you think?

Leave a comment, and share your thoughts

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes:

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>


This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.