Can we use portal collaboration to update existing hosted features

Question

We have open data content published as hosted feature services through ArcGIS Online. The data is generated through a notebook script and uploaded periodically. A year after setting up that workflow, we recently upgraded our ArcGIS Enterprise system to 10.9.1. We have experimented a bit with setting up collaborations between the two environments.

We would like to generate our open data within our enterprise environment, and use a collaboration to sync the data to ArcGIS Online, where it would be published as a read-only hosted feature layer. Is there a way to set up or modify a collaboration sync so that a new item on the guest portal updates a pre-existing item on the host portal? We don't want to lose the usage history for the existing open data.

Ken_Doman · Answer

I don't mind the piggyback. For some of our layers that group together logically, we currently group those together in a file geodatabase and publish them as a single hosted feature layer. For instance, we have fire station locations, and boundaries on the same hosted feature layer. It works if the data is parts of a whole, and you don't expect it to be picked apart.

There's a possibility we need to re-evaluate our metadata standards, to make sure we're not missing anything important. We're not publishing separate hosted views on each individual layer right now, but that time could come.

VanessaPocock · Answer

Can I ask either of you, as I'm having trouble getting information about this online. For your hosted feature layers (HFL) (either in portal or AGOL) are you publishing every feature class to its own HFL, or are you publishing a group of feature classes together to a single HFL and then serving that up to the Open Data Content group? I ask because that latter doesn't allow for layer level metadata in Portal/AGOL, which means we'd have to make hosted views of every individual layer in an HFL with many layers.

I realize I'm piggy-backing off this chat so any help would be great.

Thank you,
Vanessa

DavidColey · Answer

Well, to me its about your editing workflows.  If you are only going to be editing your portal layers as portal-hosted feature layers where edits to layers aren't coming from SDE, then you could set up the collaboration type 'as-copies' and the mode as 'send'.  This way, the edits will appear in your AGOL host at whatever interval you define.

That being said, if I were setting up 'as-copies' collaborations, it would be because I want to support two-way editing of my feature layers.  But again, it really depends on the scenario:

https://enterprise.arcgis.com/en/portal/latest/administer/windows/understand-collaborations.htm

I also think that layers as-copies requires more management overhead:

https://enterprise.arcgis.com/en/portal/latest/administer/windows/about-sharing-feature-layer-data-as-copies.htm

If you are worried about the agol usage history, delete the layer from portal.  Then set up a send-receive collaboration with the layer from agol 'as-copies'. When the workspaces sync, the agol layer will be sent to portal as a new copy.  But the portal copy won't retain the agol usage, it can't but the usage history will still show in the agol 'source'.