Inspection Workflows Part 3: Configuring ArcGIS Field Maps

[@ShaibalAhmed]

Eric Wagner, you're the best! Thank you.

[@philipnyakwaka]

Thank you so much, this tutorial has helped me built some impressive building inspection solutions

[@doryowen]

Thanks for the great demo, Eric. We have already built something similar. But now we have a big map with inspections resulting in MAINTENANCE REQUIRED. What is the next step for turning those into actions by maintenance workers? I don't want them to just scan the whole map looking for red icons. Can I create a workflow listing "work orders" for those maintenance jobs? We have used Microsoft Access for building apps to do all this but I'd like to know how to use all ArcGIS if possible or an API to build an integration. Looking for best practices & finding too many dead end paths, ESRI products being phased out soon. :(

[@AneesMerzi]

Why do you favour field maps over using survey123 for this use case? I’d love to learn your thoughts if you feel familiar enough with both. I suspect that it’s the flexibility with the forms to be seamlessly connected to each other and the ease of data collection for the field worker.

[@bobsage]

Hi Eric. You're videos are perfectly paced! If you want to input a good amount of historical data, is there a way to do that on the desktop(in AGOL or ArcGIS Pro)?

[@ericwagner5794]

Hi, Bob! Thanks again! When you say "input historical data," I assume you mean historical maintenance data that needs to be related to a parent feature. In my example, it would be: I have a bunch of hydrant inspection records and I want to associate them with the correct hydrant on the map. Is that correct? If so, this process isn't difficult, just potentially tedious. Remember that the maintenance records are nothing more than rows in a table. What makes them special is that they have GUID values that link/relate them back to the parent feature's Global ID value. It's all about the unique identifier! So, imagine your related table in ArcGIS Pro that you've built. It has a series of attribute fields. Hold onto that. You could build an identical table in Excel with the same field headings. You could then populate this Excel table with all of your maintenance records. One row per inspection filling out all of the fields. This is the first area of potential tediousness, many utilities have all of their old maintenance records on paper. So in effect, you're transcribing/digitizing all of your paper records into a table. Not difficult, it just takes time. If you're lucky, maybe this has already been done! Here's the second tedious part, your Excel table would need that GUID field (remember, this field is the glue holding the parent feature and child records in the table together). For each hydrant inspection record, you'll have to find its hydrant parent feature in GIS, get it's Global ID and paste the Global ID value into the Excel table's GUID field for that inspection. In other words, I have an inspection record for Hydrant 12345 in my Excel table. So, I'd go into ArcGIS Pro, locate Hydrant 12345 in the parent layer. I'd see that it's Global ID is ABCDEFG. I'd copy that value and paste it into the inspection record's GUID field in Excel. So, now this inspection has a GUID value matching the Global ID of the parent hydrant. Do this for every inspection record in the Excel table. If you're skilled with Excel, then there might be some shortcuts you can take to help save time. Once the Excel table is complete, you can bring it into ArcGIS Pro. If you've never worked with Excel in ArcGIS, you can't add an Excel table, instead you add the individual Excel sheets from the table; this can be done in the Catalog pane. Once in Pro, convert the sheet to a Geodatabase table using the Table to Geodatabase (conversion) tool. Now that it's in a GIS format, you can use the Append tool. This allows you to add records to an existing dataset. You'd be able to append the historical records to the existing inspection table that you already have built in ArcGIS Online. Since you have the GUID field populated in the table you just built and appended, ArcGIS Online will honor those values and link them to the correct hydrant parent feature. Depending on the number of records, append may take awhile to push the local data into ArcGIS Online. Once complete, you'll be able to tap on hydrants and access the historical records you just added. Pro tips: - The append tool is nice because it has a "Field Mapping" parameter. This controls how the attribute fields from the input datasets (your historical records table that you just made) will be transferred or mapped to the target dataset (the inspection table in ArcGIS Online). - When hunting for hydrants in the parent layer to look up Global IDs, the attribute table does have a "Find" function. In the upper right corner of the attribute table click "More Options" and choose "Find and Replace". Click the field heading that you want to search in, and use the search bar. It's faster than digging through the table or using Select By Attributes.

[@bobsage]

@@ericwagner5794 How/why in the world you take time to reply in such detail is amazing. I'm very grateful for this advice, it was the exact situation and solution I was looking for. Have a great week.

[@ericwagner5794]

@@bobsage, I truly believe the world is always a little bit better when people share their knowledge! If I know something that could be useful to others, why keep it to myself? 🙂 Plus, I bet you're not the only person with this question! Glad it helps!

[@Supppppp7]

This is awesome! I'm working on this and the joined feature layer doesn't show up in Field maps. Any idea?

[@alabrawi9]

got same issue and till date there is no update how to solve this @eric please provide a sloution to this matter

[@thegreenlandshark6086]

When I try to access the table form from Field Maps on my phone it doesn't work. An entry for my table shows up as a related record but when I tap on it, no form shows up and it's just blank. I've followed all the steps here. Any ideas?

[@katherinebaird6702]

In Field Maps: Can you edit an already existing inspection (related table record), such as to update a value you want to change? Or delete an inspection (related table record)?.. Or can you only add new records from Field Maps?

[@ericwagner5794]

Hi Katherine! You're able to add new inspections (as shown in the video), but you can also delete existing inspections or edit individual answers/attachments in them after they've been submitted. Tap on the asset that's been inspected, under "Related" tap on your related table, tap on the inspection record of interest and down at the very bottom, you'll see the options to: "edit", "copy", or "delete" the inspection record. I'll add this as well: some organizations don't want field crews to be able to edit or delete old records. They want crews to be able to see the old records, but not change historical submissions. You can configure your dataset to allow for the submission of new records, view old records, but not edit old records.* To do this go to the item details page for your hosted feature layer that has the related table. In the upper left corner, go to "Settings." Under "Feature Layer (hosted)", look at the "What kind of editing is allowed?" question. Here, you can choose if field crews can ADD new inspection records, DELETE existing records, or UPDATE (edit/change) existing records. Check the options that you want crews to have, and press "Save". Then, refresh your map in Field Maps. Hope this helps! Happy Mapping! *You must be the owner of the dataset or have it shared to you properly in a group to change these editor settings.

[@brennansmith456]

Thank you Eric, these videos are very informative! I've followed your workflow, but Field Maps will not load the 'Recent Hydrant Inspections' layer. The error (3047) appears to be related to duplicate fields. Because both the 'Hydrants' feature layer and 'Hydrant Inspections' table contained a GlobalID field, the resulting Join Features 'Recent Hydrant Inspections' layer contains two GlobalID fields (one of which gets renamed to 'globalid_1649266887779'). I'm not sure why this works in your demo but fails in my Enterprise 10.9 environment.

[@LetGo44]

Got the same issue. Also saw your post on the ESRI community. Still couldn't find a workaround...

[@joshb8916]

When I submit a maintenance record I get the error: Unable to submit, service error code 1000. I am confused what this error is and how to resolve it. Have you had any experience with the maintenance records not saving? I can tell the tablet is thinking for a few seconds upon submission and then the error comes up? Any idea how to resolve?

[@ericwagner5794]

Hi Josh B! First, I recommend logging out of Field Maps and signing back in. Try collecting data again. Sometimes it's just an authenticiation error. You could also try going to ArcGIS Online and going to "Contents", find your hosted feature layer, go to it's "Settings", and click "Rebuild Indexes". Refresh your map in Field Maps and try again. If that doesn't work, try adding the layers used for inspection to a new map and see if the issue persists. Otherwise, try rebuilding the relatioship class and republishing to ArcGIS Online.