Thanks Sundar. How could you ever asking for too much. Really, this forum is about feedback which we take seriously. If you don't ask - we wouldn't know whether product development goes in the right direction.
Regarding your questions:
No, not necessarily. It is common to start off such task given a data point location (e.g. a store) but you can freely select any point in the map here. For example - you may choose a customer location instead which isn't necessarily in your data source. You may also start by performing a search. In VA 8.3 there is a new and improved geo toolbar (left top corner) which hosts all available geo selection options. The following example shows a few pizza shops (blue stars) around the Cary, NC area: Note, that I performed a search for 'atm' which shows 20 of these around my pizza shop locations (black markers). Assuming I need some money before heading off to the restaurant. I also added a pin (green marker) indicating my home location by selecting a location on the map. I then decided to create a drive-time analysis (1 & 2 miles) from two of the ATMs to find close-by restaurants. Multi-drive time analysis is a new feature in VA 8.3 as well.
That is correct. You can select any point within the map. Reverse geo-coding means, the system is able to find the corresponding address given a freely selected point within the map. Here a screenshot showing the interactive identify region. Alternatively you can also add a pin by clicking on the map as I have done before with my home address (green marker above) - which also does reverse geocoding for you automatically. The address is shown in the toolbar or when you hover over the pin: If you have a pin - you can now go ahead and execute distance calculations (drive-time, radius) etc. And yes, data points within the distance polygon are automatically selected (potentially drive other visualizations if you setup interactions). You can see two of my pizza shops selected by the first drive-time selection polygon. New in VA 8.3 are also route calculations. In my pizza shop example above - you may want to know the distance between my home and the selected pizza shop. Above indicates that I have to drive a bit more than 8 miles to each the restaurant.
Unfortunately not, things like search pins or manually location pins are just available during exploration time and not written back to the data source. However these pins are available when you re-open your report since such changes are persisted in the user state (=a temp storage area per user).
I should also mention that we introduced support for geocoding (so the process of finding the actual coordinates given a street address). Such request can be executed prior to loading the data in VA (requires an Esri account). This is useful if you only have address information (customers, suppliers, etc.) and want to visualize your data using geographical maps.
Again, hope this helps.
Regards, Falko
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