Provide Some Means of 'Assigning' Features to Users in Hosted Layer

jcarlson

I know this is basically impossible without major changes to the DataStore, but I thought I'd still put this up for the sake of wishful thinking.

In short: I want to be able to specify the value in created_user for features with editor tracking on in some very specific instances.

There are times when I want specific users to "own" a feature for the sake of editing its attributes or geometry, but for data integrity reasons, must disable adding new features and prevent edits from touching other features in the same layer. Or the editor users do not have the source data to create the features themselves, so it must be provided for them, but after that it should be theirs to manage.

"View Layers", you may suggest, but a recent post has me rethinking that approach, and for any more than a handful of users, creating and maintaining so many views is tedious.

Perhaps there could be a way to "create feature as..." and make a new feature as if you were another user?

I understand it's a ridiculous ask, and opens the door to all kinds of problems. But still, I'd like to let editors only see and edit their own features, without also requiring said users to create the features themselves. Or suppose there was a staff change, I'd like the new employee to be able to "take" the old employee's features without re-using a username.

RobertKacir

I think your premise is very valid. I have been in many cases before where I have a feature class of existing assets that needs to be inspected by multiple people. Each of them has an assigned region of the state to inspect. Each person needs to see just their features.

I could create individual maps for each individual user but I agree with jcarlson, it is extremely tedious. This method also causes maintenance issues. We are bound to have staff turnover and the inspection regions could be reshuffled. Dataset maintenance would require adding creating a new host feature view layer according to new regions and changing around sharing characteristics. It would be nice to have a single map that changes depending on the user logged in. If the regions or staff breakdown changes I could edit the underlying data source's "assigned" field or editor field rather than making a lot of changes to different view layers, maps, and apps, it would be a lot easier.

There might be a less invasive way to create the owning model rather than "created_user" as part of editor tracking. I think it should be some kind of new field that is not system-managed like with editor tracking.