Features unexpectedly moved and stacked to others when editing

Question

Hello,

My colleagues and I are working on ArcGIS Pro 2.9, ArcGIS Enterprise 10.8.1, Utility Network v4. We use UN to manage a water distribution network.

During the last 4 months, we have been busy with the redrawal of thousands of miles of waterpipes from an old depraceted street system to an official one. We were 4 editors working on ArcGIS Pro, on separate branches, one for each municipality. When the work on a branch is done, we reconcile and post to sde.DEFAULT.

Since the begining of that massive editing task, we are experiencing a strange behaviour. After moving a bunch of points and lines to the official street system, some features are unexpectedly moved from a random place and stacked on those we just edited. Those features are frequently points but it happens on lines too. It's difficult to see when that happens because all that features are stacked.

The attributes of these "unidentified flying features" seem to be merged with the stacked "in place" feature.

We are unable to reproduce that behaviour or identify the root cause. It occurs rarely but when it does, it is so annoying...

Do some of you, fellow ArcGIS Pro users, ever experienced this or have an idea why it happens?

Kind regards,

Romain

rboreux · Answer

Hello !

Thank U for your answer. We suspected an OBJECTID issue too. It's probably a clue to figure it out. The difference between your workflow and ours is that we never delete anything. The services has specific privileges configured to avoid an accidental deletion. We just move and edit vertices.

And the issue occurs already in the branches, before we reconcile. Nevertheless, I'm not sure if it's due to a former reconcile...

rzufelt · Answer

I haven't used Branch versioning, but I have had some "similar" issues with traditional versioning before, especially if I edit the default version.

Turns out, versions appear to use the OBJECTID field to keep track of the changes, etc.  If I delete some features from default, and re-create them where they were supposed to be (rather than editing them and moving them), the new replacement features have a new OID.

So, when I now reconcile in favor of the edit version (even when choosing attributes), Arc doesn't see the original features as the OID has changed, so it copies them back in to default in the wrong (original) location.

Not sure if this has anything to do with your issue, but only thing I've ran into that might help figure it out.

Good luck,

R_