AGOL Notebook - item.export and the 'overwrite' argument

AaronKoelker

I'm writing a notebook to export a hosted feature layer that I own as a File Geodatabase item into my content, using item.export . This would be used as a backup copy of my data, if needed. I then intend to schedule a task for the notebook to have it run on its own periodically -- and ideally would like it to overwrite the previously-created backup each time so that I don't have a bunch of items creating clutter and taking up storage space.

The item.export method has an argument for 'overwrite' to replace an existing item, which sounds like what I need, however I'm either misunderstanding it or it doesn't seem to be working correctly. When I set overwrite = true, it just creates a new item in my content with the same exact name.

 

 

dataitem = gis.content.get(#itemid)
backupname = f'{dataitem.title} Backup'
dataitem.export(backupname, 'File Geodatabase', parameters=None, wait=True, overwrite=True)

 

 

Any idea if this is a bug or intended behavior? Is there a better way to do this? I tried using a search to locate the previous backup so I could just delete it -- but even when feeding in the exact item name, it would occasionally pull up some other item in the org.

Anonymous User

@AaronKoelkerwe decided to remove this parameter in v2.0 of the API (future release). The reason being, server does not establish a comprehensive item2item relationship for this use case, without which the API does not know which item to overwrite. Besides, we have a cardinality issue where a source item gets exported multiple times and the API would not know which of those items to overwrite.

The alternate is for you (as the user) to determine which item needs to be updated and call the https://developers.arcgis.com/python/api-reference/arcgis.gis.toc.html#arcgis.gis.Item.update (DestinationItem.update()) method on it and pass the file that was returned from the SourceItem.export() call.