possible to assign ownership before enabling editor tracking/ownership based control?

ClaraDair

I would like to enable ownership access with editor tracking on existing data, I edited a column to reflect the owner of each feature, then I enabled editor tracking from properties to manually select my edited column as the creator field, hoping that ownership would be honored when editing via a feature service.  Instead, as soon as I enabled editor tracking, the entire column of creator field was turned to <NULL>. Wiped out all 20,000 rows' ownership in the creatorfield column that I manually created..

Is there any way to assign ownership first on existing data and then enforce that ownership-based control with editor tracking, or is this feature only for features created *after* editor tracking is enabled?   Any hints appreciated - thanks!

RussellBrennan

We should support the ability to enable editor tracking on columns that already have data in them. Can you tell me more about exactly what you had in the column before you attempted to enable editor tracking. I assume you are using a string/text field, can you confirm?

You mention that you used the properties page to enable editor tracking, can you please confirm this? Did you try with the enable editor tracking geoprocessing tool?

Can you let me know what version of Desktop, Geodatabase, and Oracle you are using?

Is your data registered as versioned?

I tried to replicate the issue you are describing and in my case everything worked as you desired.