Hi there,
when I imported my old Arc data into Arc 4, all historical places are know marked as unknown. In the old app it would assign a place based on the proximity, and it was generally close enough I didn’t manually confirm them. Is there a way for all unknown places to be replaced by their near proximity, similar to how it was in the previous Arc? Or do I now have to go back through in the new app and confirm locations ?
otherwise loving the new app and the updates made.
Hi @Timt! Glad to hear you’re liking the new app!
For the problems you’re describing, I’m not quite clear yet on what you’re seeing in the app.
For this, are you meaning that the data migrated from the old app is showing none of the place assignments that were in the old app? If so, could you show me some examples with screenshots from the old app and new?
If this is happening that is a serious issue, but also one that is extremely unlikely. Well, unless there was data corruption during the migration, perhaps phone turned off part way, or it ran out of space.
So yeah, I think first step is to be clear about what you’re seeing there, so we know how what kind of situation we’re dealing with.
This is the same in the new app. That functionality hasn’t changed. So if you’re seeing different behaviour there, we’ll need to track down why.
Though I do recommend going into the confirm view (the banner at top of timeline view, “2 unconfirmed” etc) and confirming assignments periodically. That’s important so that the system learns when it’s getting things right or wrong.
Hey Matt, thanks for the reply! Here’s a few screenshots to explain what I’m seeing, this is happening both with the imported data (example from April 12th) and new data (yesterday). I do periodically confirm and update locations if I see large issues but the old app overall has been very accurate, you can see 57-58 unconfirmed items on the April 12th day but one has locations and the other doesn’t. The main concern with this though is that unknown places don’t show up in the places tab, which is a feature I was looking forward to. I also did delete the app and then re-download and re-import and the same issue persisted, so that’s when I made this post here.
Thanks in advance for your help!
Ok I’m starting to see the shape of the problem now @Timt.
In the old app almost all of your visits have no place assignment at all. They’re only showing the street address, which is automatically picked up from a “reverse geocode” map service. All those light grey titles, “Ann St”, “Front St”, even “Terminal 3” etc.
The new app doesn’t yet support that street address functionality on visits.
Street addresses on visits also aren’t something that’s locked in, that’s just a fallback detail shown in the UI as placeholder until a place assignment has been made.
In the old app you can lock in street addresses as custom titles, by using the “Set title to street address” button. Though the new app doesn’t support that yet either. (That functionality depends on the visits having street address lookup functionality first).
So I’m seeing two actionables on my side here: Adding the visits street address functionality to the new app, and also adding the option to set a visit’s custom title to the street address.
The first one’s issue number is BIG-455, and second’s is BIG-277. Those are both filed for getting into upcoming updates, so should hopefully be arriving in the near future!
Ok I see one more on my side: the places migrated from old app to new aren’t available for auto assignment until you’ve manually assigned them at least once. Then after that the new app will auto assign them as appropriate. I’ll file something for fixing that up.
That then leads on to the next thing:
I’m seeing extremely high counts for “uncertain items” in your screenshots. That’s the app telling you the data isn’t good and asking you to help out, so that it can learn from your corrections and confirmations.
So that’s the other side of how this situation has happened. The timeline data is in a sort of “semi complete” state, with no place assignments or confirmations. From the screenshots it appears as though nothing in the old app has been “locked in” by confirmation or correction, so what you’ve got there is almost pure, raw recorded state. And the new app not supporting yet the street addresses on visits is making that stand out quite dramatically.
When you see “2 unconfirmed” or “2 uncertain” or whatever at the top of the timeline, it’s a good idea to respond to that. Even if it’s just to tap the “confirm all” button on the other side (after a quick scan down the list to be sure the assignments are all correct). That goes a long way to improving data quality and also data persistence, so that nothing gets auto changed later.
Anyway, enough lecturing 
I’ll get to fixing things up on my side, so that you’ll see street addresses showing up on timeline view again in an update soon! Once those features ship, you should see new timeline data showing up roughly the same as you did in the old app.
