We are running Enterprise 10.8.1, SQL Server, running all our work in ArcPro 2.7, and have an SDE in place that is backing Field Efforts using ArcGIS Collector. In order to increase efficiency in the field we have created multiple coded domains for different fields. It was our goal to ensure that these wouldn't need to be changed in the future as a domain or field being altered is considered a schema change and means the feature service needs to be overwritten or re-published.
Unfortunately, we now need to alter a few of the domains. And, at this point we have over 100 services running from this SDE. I have tried testing to see if we can change the domains without overwriting or re-publishing. Below are the steps I have tested.
1. Stopping all services that are using a certain domain > Altering the domain > Restarting the services = The result of this is that the changes don't come through and it registers the old domain
2. Stopping all services that are using a certain domain > creating an entirely new domain > swapping the old domain out for the new in desktop > restarting the service = the result of this is that no domain appears at all. If we stop the service again, and then swap it back to the old domain it will pull the old domain through.
The other limitation is that we can't edit many of these domains as the feature services will cause schema locks.
My current thinking is we need to create entirely new domains > assign them to the services 1-by-one > and overwrite them so we don't need to re-add them to all the maps.
Before we go forward with this I wanted to kindly inquire of this community if anyone else had worked with domains that are published to 'live' data from an SDE? If so, would they happen to have any other suggestions of things I could try to make this more efficient please?