Re publishing / updating survey

Question

Hello everyone! I'm looking for your valuable input and suggestions regarding an update and republishing of my survey. I've already created and shared the survey for a pre-test to gather feedback from a small group of participants.

Now, I'm ready to publish it again to collect a larger number of responses from various channels like universities and social media. However, since I've previously published it, I already have around 30 responses from the pre-test group. What should I do in this situation? Should I delete the existing data or separate it, considering it's from the previous version of the survey? if so, how could I separate it?

Your guidance is much appreciated! Thank you for your help!

dougbrowning · Answer

Is there a reason you do not just keep using the one you have?  Most changes you can do without breaking the service. 123 will tell you if it needs to wipe the data or not.

If you cannot you can publish the new service then use ArcPro and the Append tool to copy from one layer to the other even if the schemas are different.

Either way always make a backup first.

Hope that helps.

Katie_Clark · Answer

I'd say there are a few things to consider here to determine your best course of action. Here are my personal recommendations:

* Are the responses from the pre-test group valid, or is it just test data?* If test data: it makes sense to delete
* If valid data: will publishing the updates to the survey cause the feature layer to be overwritten so you'll lose existing data? (it should give you a warning before publishing if this is the case. Only certain types of changes cause this to happen, i.e. changing a field type for a question).* If no loss of data after publishing updates: keep as is. Perhaps add a hidden "Dev Notes" field to the feature layer or something, where you can write a note to indicate that the responses were submitted with a previous version of the survey, if that's info that you need to keep track of. 
* If loss of data after publishing updates: export the feature layer as a file geodatabase first. You can then either save these records in that format for archive/reference purposes, or append into the updated feature layer after publishing the updates.

Hope that helps!