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Inventory Management System: Contract Cruisers

Inventory Management System: Contract Cruisers

 

Overview

One challenge that larger organizations may face as they migrate to the use of enterprise GIS as the framework for their inventory is how to enable appropriate access to both employees and contractors. The simplest deployment of WSG Inventory Management System is to utilize a single feature service and to provide all cruisers access to all data by inviting them to join one or more groups and then sharing the service to that group or groups. The problem with this approach is that all users can view, edit and delete any data. While careful backup policies can ensure that any data that are accidentally changed or deleted can be restored, there are many scenarios where users should not even be able to view or edit some data within the feature service. This document presents several approaches to preventing inappropriate viewing, editing or deleting of data by specific users.

Device-Level Controls

The simplest way to restrict data that cruiser has access to apply download filters on their device via Download Parameters in MobileMap. These can be configured manually, or imported along with other settings from a settings file or settings stored within the metadata of a feature service. This is useful when all users are trusted and the main goal is to avoid clutter and reduce download times. Examples of this are when a trusted employee only wants to see cruise data for a specific tree farm. To avoid accidentally modifying data from a tree farm managed by other employees, and to reduce the time to download data, they can apply a download filter to make sure the data from that other tree farms is never downloaded. See MobileMap: Download Parameters for more information on using download parameters. Note that all layers must include appropriate attribute fields and values to enable download parameters to function properly.

Hosted Feature Layer Views

A more secure and consistent approach to restricting data access can be achieved using ArcGIS Hosted Feature Layer Views. Hosted Feature Layer Views act just like a typical Feature Service, but they provide a ‘view’ of that service that limits data according to pre-defined spatial or attribute subsets. Typical examples are to create Hosted Feature Layer Views that are read-only for all users, that only include data for a specific geographic region (e.g., National Forest, tree farm, work center, or contractor ID). When users create and edit data in a Hosted Feature Layer View, the data can be accessed from the ‘master’ Feature Service that was used to create the Hosted Feature Layer Views. This allows data managers to access all of the data in one Feature Service, even if many different Hosted Feature Layer Views are used to provide the level of data security needed for all users and groups.

Hosted Feature Layer Views are easy to create from a Feature Service, documentation can be found here: https://doc.arcgis.com/en/arcgis-online/manage-data/create-hosted-views.htm . Esri also describes how Hosted Feature Layer Views can be used to provide different views of the data for employees vs. contractors in this blog post: https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/data-management/mapping/getting-started-with-hosted-feature-layer-views/ . Note that WSG Inventory Management System does not use Web Maps per se, and thus the pattern for implementing Hosted Feature Layer Views is a little less complex than the diagram in the blog post linked above: