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Hosted Feature Layer Views

A practical example

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What is a hosted feature layer view?

Besides being a bit of a mouthful to say, hosted feature layer views are really about giving you, as map authors, a flexible way to share data with your audiences, while controlling how they access that information and what they can do with it, as well as limiting access to some parts of the data when needed. This helps you create a focused experience that is right for each audience, and at the same time makes the job of data management easier.

From an existing hosted feature layer, you can create one or more views. For the most part, a view looks and acts just like a regular hosted feature layer, but with one big difference. The view references the same data as the feature layer ( no data duplication) from which it was created, but its symbology, capabilities, and even the features and fields that are visible to the audience can be configured independently from the original feature layer.

A practical approach

Like many things in life hosted feature layer views are much easier to understand with an example. The example I'm going to use is one I've talked about in a previous blog post. Rather than just talking about it though I'm going to actually walk through each of the use cases and examples and make four separate views and configure four purpose built applications.  Two of the views will satisfy needs inside of the organization.  One of those views will allow field staff to view recent sightings when they are out doing work around the town, as well as give them the ability to report their own sightings during the course of their day.  The second view will show staff reviewing the data only the sightings that need to be reviewed, deleted, or edited.  Two more views will also be created to engage and inform the public.  One view will be added into a crowd sourcing app to allow the public to report their own coyote sightings.  And the final view will be added to a public awareness app to show areas where there are increased coyote sightings. Below is a rough diagram of each view and an outline of what each view will entail.

The Conceptual Overview

Diagram of what we're going to need to create at the end of the day to satisfy the use cases below

Understanding what your audience needs

Diagram of who we're building it for and what they want they need to be able to dodo we start with ? 

I've published my hosted feature layer now what?  

While you can start with any of the audiences outlined above, we’ll focus first on the field staff who need to report sightings and have the sighting information available to them while they work. Starting here is a good idea because before rolling out a crowd sourcing solution to everyone in your city, you may want to pilot it on smaller scale first. Knowing that you want to support your staff in the field independent of any crowd sourcing applications, starting with the field staff also allows you to work through any kinks or insights that might come up along the way before giving access to everyone.

Creating a Hosted Feature Layer View

Creating a view is easy. Go to your hosted feature layer’s item page and choose Create View. I recommend giving it a new name so that its easy to tell at a glance who the layer is for After the view has been created, you can configure it the same way you would any other feature layer. Note for some capabilities like sync you need to first enable it on the primary (original) feature layer for the option to be present on the view.

The video below shows how to create a hosted feature layer view to be used in the field user map. After the view is created you can then go an enable editing, set the layer to add only and then set the feature definition.

Video showing the creation of a hosted feature layer view

Setting View Definitions

After creating your view, you can set view definitions that are enforced when the view is used. For example, you can hide fields you don't want people to see or only show a subset of the features in the overall dataset. Setting definitions can be done from the Visualization tab of the view’s item page or from the layer options menu in the map viewer under Set View Definition > Define Features. If you had fields that you want to hide from the view (like we want to do in the case of the public view layer) you can also choose Define Fields to hide them.

This video below shows how to set a feature definition on a hosted feature layer view.  In the video we are setting a feature definition on the field user view layer so that they only see recent coyote sightings (from 2016 - present) show on the map.

Video showing setting a feature definition on a view layer

Staff Reporting

While it's very likely that the field staff will be using Collector for ArcGIS when doing their field work, Collector runs natively on smart phones and tablets and not on the web so it’s tricky to show in a Story Map. A simple web app built with Web AppBuilder for ArcGIS is used here to show the final results of the Staff Reporting view.

This web app shows the view created to report field staff data collection.

Web app showing the add only view created for data collection by staff

Staff Reviewing

Data quality is very important, and before sharing information with the public you want to make sure it has gone through a review process. To make that easier, you can create a view of the data that only shows sightings that are pending review.

Public Reporting

Giving the public a simple and easy way to report coyote sightings allows you to crowd source more information and gain a greater understanding of where coyotes are being seen. This additional insight allows you to prioritize awareness and resources.

This public survey for reporting coyote sightings was built using the Geoform web app template.

Public survey for reporting coyote sightings using the geoform web app template

Public Viewing

Last, but not least, as part of this project we want to inform the public of areas that may have a higher risk of encountering coyotes. This awareness app takes all of the data that has been verified by city staff and symbolizes it as a heat map, to highlight areas where there has been a higher density of sightings.

Town of Oakville Coyote Resources

The examples shown in this Story Map leverage data downloaded from the Town of Oakville which sits south west of Toronto, Canada., but it’s important to note that it has been modified slightly. If you are interested in seeing and learning more about coyote sightings, Oakville maintains its own awareness map that can be explored below.

Additionally, if you'd like to learn more about strategies that Oakville is employing to help prevent coyotes from becoming comfortable in urban areas, check out the following video.

Living with coyotes — hazing

Whats next?

What's next is up to you. We hope this Story Map has given you some ideas of how you can use views to simplify data management and sharing the right information with the right audience in a controlled way.

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