I am in the process of relocating to Colorado. It has been ten years since I have worked in an office, and am excited to see my coworkers daily. Hopefully, my team feels the same. What does offline Esri Collector have to do with my relocation?
In my last trip to the office for the company Christmas party, I leveraged the opportunity to tour some houses in Aurora, Colorado, a suburb of Denver. My realtor, Pam Gromer, put together an aggressive agenda of at least ten homes! By the time we concluded the attack, my brain was fried and couldn’t distinguish one house from the others.
This leads to the purpose of this post. Esri’s Collector application (view details here) would be an excellent tool to document the location of homes visited on a real-estate hunt. The features of Collector have been well documented in previous SSP blog posts, and I am not going to regurgitate them here.
There is one feature of offline data collection these past posts do not address, however. This functionality is extremely appealing for users that may work in an area of limited cellular coverage: the offline Esri Collector function. In my case, I will be using a SSP-provided telephone on a SSP-paid data plan. It isn’t fair to ask Skye to pay for my personal data use. If I collected home location data in offline mode, however, and later synced the data when Wi-Fi was available, there would be zero data use.
Enter Esri Collector for ArcGIS.
Building an Offline Esri Collector App for House Hunting
The first step to creating a useable real estate ArcGIS Online application is to create a point feature class with all necessary field attributes. I personally want only minimal fields; I want to document my impression of the property. I don’t want to hold Pam up by entering attribute information in that is probably already available on the MLS. I wanted my data entry to be efficient, not a pain.
I came up with the following attributes (Figure 1):
- Address as Text (length of 50)
- Interested as Long (Apply Yes/No Domain)
- Comments as Text (length of 255)
It would also be very convenient to be able to attach photographs to the collected data. Since collection will be in offline mode, data use will not be a problem here. Simple answer: Attachments will be created.
Editing My Data Offline:
Once our feature class is published and available as a feature layer, we now want to make sure the layer is available for offline editing via Collector. We need to verify two things on the Settings for the layer (Figure 2):
- The “Enable editing” option is checked
- The “Enable Sync” option is checked
We are now ready to test on my smart phone. It should be noted that since I am just using this application for myself, establishing permissions to individuals or groups isn’t a priority. If this is of interest, the following blog posts are suggested:
On a mobile device, we first need to fire up Esri’s Collector for ArcGIS and log into an ArcGIS Online account. After logging into SSP’s account, the first thing we see is Chris Sander’s web maps (Figure 4). After that, we see the new RealEstate web map, which I have highlighted at the bottom.
Notice that this web map has a download icon. This will enable the user to store the area in which data collection is anticipated on the device and not rely on leveraging the cellular data plan.
It is very important you click that download icon, to ensure you can use the app successfully offline.
Downloading Your Real Estate Map
After we click the download tool, we are presented an option to choose an existing downloaded basemap or download a new one (Figure 5). We are going to download a new one.
Once we have choosen the “Download a new basemap” option, we must choose our work area (Figure 6). Normally, I would choose the Aurora area since this is the area where I will be looking for houses, but we need to test it first. Since I am currently writing this post in Philadelphia, going to choose this area. We also want to make the chosen area as small as possible to reduce the amount of device data storage.
We then select the Map Detail tab on the bottom of the screen (Figure 7). By zooming in, we increase the resolution of the basemap but also increase the amount of data storage required (estimated on the screen). Once the desired resolution is achieved, click “Download.”
Once download is complete (probably should be done using Wi-Fi or defeats the purpose), our Real Estate application is now ready for testing. To completely test, I will turn off my cellular data and my wifi.
Collecting Our First Point while Offline!
With my phone offline, I went outside to collect a point. The downloaded basemap was available (Figure 8), and the designated fields were as specified which I populated (Figure 9). I also took a photograph to be stored as an attachment.
Syncing Data Once Back on Wifi
Now that I have completed my offline data collection, I will turn on my Wi-Fi. If we look at the map list now, we now observe that one feature is ready to be synced (Figure 10). Upon clicking the button, the point and its attributes and attached image are synced with ArcGIS Online.
And finally we pull up the synced data on ArcGIS Online to verify functionality (Figure 11)!
Pam, it looks like we are ready to go house shopping again! In the mean time, if anybody is interested in a house outside Philadelphia with a custom kick-butt mailbox, please let me know.
What’s the Coolest Offline Esri Collector Application You’ve Built?
Let me know in the comments!
What do you think?