Hello @JessicaRouns. No, there no plans to develop an out-of-the-box inbound connector for GeoEvent Server that reads the Esri Shapefile format. Using a shapefile to capture and relay sensor observations to GeoEvent Server is not considered a good fit for real-time data.
Date values in a shapefile are stored as a character string yyyy-mm-dd without a time. When using a shapefile, the time portion of a datetime value is truncated / dropped from the data value. For example, the datetime 2002-08-20 12:00:00 PM is stored in a shapefile as simply 2002-08-20. This is a severe limitation when considering the collecting and representation of sensor data presumably being updated in real-time.
I would encourage you to consider ways that you might capture sensor observations as either delimited text or JSON formatted data records. You could relay delimited text to a GeoEvent Server input via a TCP socket relatively easily, or use an input capable of receiving JSON as HTTP/POST requests. Either way, you are probably going to want to use a web service to convey the data, or write a Python script to send the data to GeoEvent Server's input. You could use a system file to convey the data as either delimited text or in a JSON format, but I would recommend other transport protocols over using system files.
Hope this information helps --
RJ
cross-reference:
- Calculate date fields (ArcGIS Pro Documentation)
- Fundamentals of date fields (ArcMap 10.8 Documentation)