I am working on a linear transportation highway construction project where the alignment is around 20 miles long. Our users need to perform inspections on activities occurring anywhere along the alignment every day. There is spotty internet coverage at best along the project site, so offline is a must.
We have setup an ArcGIS Online map for use in collector and already have gone through the process to create (very large) tpk file that covers the entire project area. The tpk is already loaded on the iPads to be used in the field.
WHEN OUR USERS TRY TO TAKE THE MAP OFFLINE - NO MATTER WHAT WE DO, COLLECTOR WILL NOT ALLOW THE USER TO ZOOM OUT AND SELECT A WORK AREA THAT COVERS THE ENTIRE PROJECT AREA. (which is covered by the pre-loaded tpk).
So my question is this - What process governs/determines the maximum extent of the work area that Collector will allow the end user to see and what factors in our AGOL Maps can we modify to provide users with the ability to use the desired extents for downloading the map?
We have been banging our heads against the wall on this. We really need our maps to cover the entire project area.
It is not a viable workflow to make the users remove the map and then re-download the map for a new area every time they want to collect data at another part of the project not covered by their initial map download. The field users already spent some time downloading for offline use. It also is a time consuming process to re-download a map covering a large area, even if the basemap is already on the device. As a result some of our users have resorted to trying to collect features outside the work area, and this is creating significant headaches as we cannot recover that data.
NOTE - we have an ArcGIS Server tile layer which is the source of the tile package as the basemap of the map. I have some suspicions that Collector is determining the work area polygon by reaching back to the service to determine the maximum number of tiles the service will allow users to take offline, and calculating the extent from that. any insight would be appreciated.