topic Re: How to Increase Text Field Size without Losing Data in ArcGIS Survey123 Questions

How to Increase Text Field Size without Losing Data

Billy — Sat, 26 Feb 2022 16:02:42 GMT

Hi,

We have a published survey that we need to increase a text field size. When we set the new size on the esri:fieldLength in Connect and then try to re-publish we get a warning that the data will be lost.

How can we increase the size of the text field without losing the data?

Survey123 Connect version: 3.14.256

Survey published to ArcGIS Online.

Regards.

Re: How to Increase Text Field Size without Losing Data

JohannesLindner — Mon, 28 Feb 2022 06:33:30 GMT

I don't know how to do it in AGOL, but here's how you would do it in the Desktop environments, maybe it's similar...

create a temporary text field with at least the size of the original text field
copy all values from the text field to the temporary text field
recreate the text field with the new size
copy all values from the temporary text field to the recreated text field
delete the temporary text field
republish

Re: How to Increase Text Field Size without Losing Data

shan_sarkar — Mon, 28 Feb 2022 09:37:09 GMT

In ArcGIS desktop you can simply increase the field length without having to create a temporary field. The temporary field comes into play if you need to decrease the field size.

Refer Modify field properties

Re: How to Increase Text Field Size without Losing Data

JohannesLindner — Mon, 28 Feb 2022 09:44:38 GMT

Huh, seems like I wrongly remembered my struggles with changing field length... That's good to know, thanks for the tip!

Re: How to Increase Text Field Size without Losing Data

DerrickWestoby — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 18:26:52 GMT

I don't think you remembered incorrectly, @JohannesLindner ...I think this behavior changed within the last year.