topic How to overwrite a service owned by someone else? in ArcGIS Enterprise Questions

How to overwrite a service owned by someone else?

tigerwoulds — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 14:27:41 GMT

Using a Federated 10.7.1 environment here. We have map service published to the GIS Server. How can someone overwrite an existing service that is owned by someone else? We have a team of people working on a project with multiple services. All users are set to the Creator role with Publisher user type. From a productivity standpoint, we do not want to have to change ownership for services each time a new person needs to overwrite. What is the correct workflow for overwriting a service owned by someone else?

Re: How to overwrite a service owned by someone else?

Robert_LeClair — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 16:52:38 GMT

Tiger - from my research on the internals, this is what I learned:

<CLIP>

Generally, the answer is that publishers can only overwrite services they own:

https://enterprise.arcgis.com/en/server/latest/deploy/windows/administer-a-federated-server.htm

"Publishers can only work with services that they have created in the portal. They cannot modify or delete other publishers' services"

"Administrators have user and publisher privileges, and they have permissions to all services hosted by the federated server."

To overwrite services owned by someone else, you would either need to be an Administrator, or use a custom role that has administrative content privileges. If you decide to go this route, keep in mind this section from the above documentation:

"If a custom role is created with any administrative privileges, ArcGIS Server will grant members within that role full administrative access. This includes rights to publish any service type directly to ArcGIS Server and the ability to view and access all services. Consider the security risks before creating a custom role for any member that includes administrative privileges."

Re: How to overwrite a service owned by someone else?

tigerwoulds — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 20:12:08 GMT

I see, thanks for the response. My only gripe with setting users as Administrator is that they then have full administrative privileges to the GIS Server. They can edit the Primary Site Admin account if they found the setting in Server Manager. Although they can view all services and (probably) overwrite services not owned by them, I do not want them to have this access. So basically our only option is to re-assign the owner when someone new wants to overwrite a service, correct?

Re: How to overwrite a service owned by someone else?

IhabHassan — Thu, 11 Jun 2020 03:50:51 GMT

Hi Tiger

I had to do something very similar lately, which is overwriting hosted layers after reprojecting the source data, and I found that I cannot republish/overwrite the hosted layer even if I am using Portal site admin user through the process. I had to assign the portal item to my user, do the data changes, republish the hosted layer with the "overwrite" option enabled, then assign the portal item back to the original portal user.
Assigning the portal item -hosted layer or a map service on a federated server- can be done in 1 single step using the API for Python:

portalItem.reassign_to(target_owner=user, target_folder=folder)

arcgis.gis module — arcgis 1.8.0 documentation

Regards

Ihab Hassan

Re: How to overwrite a service owned by someone else?

tigerwoulds — Thu, 11 Jun 2020 12:59:54 GMT

Thanks Ihab, that's good to know. I wish we could overwrite services without changing ownership! This functionality existed in our stand along ArcGIS Server 10.5.1. Was hoping I wasn't missing something obvious

Re: How to overwrite a service owned by someone else?

Anonymous User — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 15:03:27 GMT

I would agree. I found last week that using our Portal 10.9.1 as an Admin I was not able to overwrite another Admin's feature service. I was shocked. "I'm an admin, I should be able to do everything!?".

Re: How to overwrite a service owned by someone else?

Anonymous User — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 15:28:16 GMT

https://support.esri.com/en/technical-article/000026909 Only Hosted ArcGIS Online feature layers.

The layer is not hosted in ArcGIS Online. Overwriting capabilities are not supported for non-hosted feature layers.

That stinks!

Re: How to overwrite a service owned by someone else?

Kevin_MacLeod — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 20:10:21 GMT

@Robert_LeClair Robert, is Esri planning to add this Feature Enhancement?

This is a significant platform design issue.

As tiger and others have noted, it would be simply solved by enabling some type of role that would allow users to edit ALL services (without Admin) ... and also a way to create a customer role where you could check off specific services they could edit. To make it truly flexible, it would allow the Admin to enable setting up the Role as Include or Exclude: .... i.e. check off only services NOT allowed to edit, or alternatively; check only services that ARE allowed to be edited. I am not admin so I can not explore this too much but I think Custom Roles can enable Publishing but I am not sure whether it gets this granular. And it would be great to have more granularity per service per role.

Re: How to overwrite a service owned by someone else?

Robert_LeClair — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 15:51:24 GMT

Kevin - apologies for the late response but I did want to update you on this item. There is an ENH-000107856 request - "Provide support for all ArcGIS Online (and ArcGIS Enterprise) organization members who have access and update capability for a hosted feature layer/service to be able to overwrite the item" that is currently "under consideration."