ArcGIS Field Maps: Offline Edits Fail to Sync - Let's Troubleshoot

GlenShepherd · ‎08-23-2021

So... We've done a cracking job of configuring our web map for working offline in ArcGIS Field Maps. Our field team has downloaded offline areas successfully and they're out making edits in the wilderness. They've come back within good cell phone reception (or connected to WiFi) and... Oh No...

"Sync Failed"
"Unable to synchronize replica"
"No permission to edit replica data"

Damn... So what's going on here? How can we figure out where the disconnect lies and fix our syncing issues?

Troubleshooting: Could it be...

Offline Area Update Issues?

When managing the offline map areas, we should be aware of their behaviour and limitations if changes are made to the web map and its content: See: Update an offline area
If either your web map or feature layer(s) have been renamed or their schema changed (while edits were being made offline), then this can cause a disconnect when the replica (your offline map area) tries to sync back to the parent feature layer. Your edits are calling out for their parent and no one is there! Look to undo any of the changes that were made at the web portal level if possible and update those areas back to their original state. If we can't do that, you may need to download the edits and sync manually. See: How To: Access offline edits from Collector for ArcGIS directly from an Android or iOS device

Web Map and Layers Issues?

If the 'Sync' setting is disabled and re-enabled on a particular layer, then any pending offline edits will no longer be able to sync back.
Are we making offline edits to a 'View Layer'? We'll need to check if the view layer is still working as expected and/or if it has inherited some schema changes from its parent feature layer that might affect our edits syncing back. Please see: Feature Layer Views: Updating Parent Feature Layer Schema
Have changes been made to the Layers' JSON via the 'Update Definition' operation? Look to undo those edits and test your workflow again. We want the 'capabilities' parameters to be conducive to working offline (e.g. 'sync' enabled).

Permissions Issues? An individual or a specific group of mobile workers are failing to sync edits.

If the mobile team have the same (or similar) user types and member roles within your organisation, then we'll need to look into their permissions and identify what might prevent them from making edits to the parent feature layer. Two log messages to look out for are "Unable to synchronize replica" and "No permission to edit replica data". A good, first port of call, is to log into the mobile app with an Administrator role and carry out the same workflow. If you can sync successfully, this issue could be related to the other mobile workers' accounts. See: Taking User Types to the Field
Look into group membership. Do some mobile workers access this web map through a 'Shared Update' group while others do not? The 'Shared Update' group setting gives members elevated privileges. See: Shared Update Groups. You may need to change the feature layer settings and/or move members to different groups.

Network Issues?

If MDM Solutions are being employed to manage the organisation's field devices, you may need to ask your IT team to monitor network traffic at the time of sync failure. See if they can identify any security settings that may be blocking the communication back to your web portal. The latest support for MDM configurations can be found here: New Technical Paper: ArcGIS Mobile Apps & Mobile Device Management (MDM) Support
Errors or log messages citing "certificate" or "authentication" failures can be common when using ArcGIS Enterprise or services coming from an ArcGIS Server site through ArcGIS Online. If a web adaptor certificate has been updated, mobile workers will need to update this on their device. See: Learn How to Install a SSL Certificate for a Secured Portal on a mobile device

Dos and Don'ts...

Users should always 'sync' their offline areas prior to going offline, in order to download any updates made to the web map and its content.
After making changes to our web maps and layers, always test your offline edit/sync workflow prior to conducting further production field data capture.
If offline map area updates are on a schedule... Don't make edits to the web map or layers' settings while mobile workers are still in the field or have un-synced edits pending
Don't update offline map areas while mobile workers are still in the field or have un-synced edits pending

Anonymous User · ‎12-01-2021

Hi Glen, I think I am having some web map and layers issues? I think you would be the right person to talk to, is there any way I could email you a description of my issues? Thank you for this post. -Giselle

GlenShepherd · ‎12-07-2021

@Anonymous User

Hi Giselle, I'll send you a personal message through Esri Community and we can take a look at what you're observing.
You should be able to see it by going to the envelope icon in the top-right hand corner.

vijaybadugu · ‎12-14-2021

Hi, I am getting these error, when i try to download or update Offline Maps in ArcGIS Field Maps. First time it was working as expected. Later on when i try to update these, I am getting these errors. I have to recreate Managed areas again to work properly

GlenShepherd · ‎12-16-2021

Hi @vijaybadugu ,

This blog is about troubleshooting failures when syncing edits made to your vector data when working offline.
Whereas it sounds like you're having issues with creating/updating the offline areas in the first place?

You might like to read over te following resources regarding expected behaviour when updating changes to your offline mapa areas:

Your ArcGIS Server errors would indicate that the SyncTools utility service has encountered a parameter within your web service that doesn't comply with syncing the replica.

I would recommend reaching out to Esri technical support. We would need a lot more information to pin point what might be causing this issue, i.e:

Version of your ArcGIS Enterprise
Are you accessing the ArcGIS Server service through ArcGIS Portal or ArcGIS Online?
Is the feature service hosted or referenced? If referenced, what is the data source? (i.e. Oracle, SQL Server? What version of geodatabase was it published from?)
Is this data source versioned? Archive-enabled? Sync-enabled?
Have you tested with other feature services? Is this occurring for all feature services across your organisation?

Thanks,

Glen.

Strahanjen · ‎07-19-2022

Hi @GlenShepherd

I downloaded an offline area (created using Field Maps app), went into airplane mode, submitted a new point to a layer and then switched out of airplane mode and tried to sync. I'm getting the following error:

Sync Failed:

Feature errors:

Layer: <layer name>

Added:

-(fid 205): Service error code 1000

In the troubleshooting log, everything seems to be successful except for this message:

No map area found. Download scheduled updates unavailable.

Do you have any suggestions as to how to troubleshoot and resolve this issue?

Thanks!

JoabelBarbieri · ‎11-11-2022

How do I copy the offline data manually out of a tablet to save months of work someone did, now that the map won't sync? I had this issue and this helped me a lot.

How To: Access offline edits from ArcGIS Field Maps directly from an Android device (esri.com)

hope it can help someone here as well

Mondi_GIS · ‎11-17-2022

Hi Glen,

I have been struggling for months now to get our sync working. It works on a small area, but fails to sync when I try to have larger areas. The error seems to relate to our most important dataset, the register of all our forestry compartments and their attributes. This layer is not editable to the viewers, and is just there for reference purposes. I get the error:

Sync Failed

Unable to synchronize replica.

Details:

Sync replica internal error - (and then a number of different IDs).

This layer gets synchronised from our Portal to AGOL overnight, and we have spent a lot of time optimising the script, as it used to truncate and append everytime but we found this was causing massive replica log on AGOL and causing the file to grow to beyond 30GB. We now only edit the geometry were there were changes and then update the attributes (Age, species etc). It worked fore two weeks and I was rejoicing, and now it is broken again and I am beyond desperate at this point in time. I have all our senior management breathing down my neck, asking when we will sort out this bug and go live or should we throw ESRI out completely if their apps aren't reliable?

SteveTaylor6 · ‎11-17-2022

Hi Mondi_GIS

In the Australian Capital Territory government we have had no sync issues with Field Maps app. Your issue is puzzling. It sounds like it is trying to sync your large reference layer.

Maybe create a tiled map with the reference data instead. That should fix the issue.

GlenShepherd · ‎11-17-2022

Hi @Mondi_GIS ,

So from what I understand, we have a feature layer in ArcGIS Enterprise portal that gets updated with a script every night.

the layer participates in a distributed collaboration with ArcGIS Online;
we've added the reference layer to a web map; but
syncronising large offline areas fails in ArcGIS Field Maps.

My questions would be:

is this 'update' script running an overwrite on the feature layer in portal?
have you tested using this layer in another web map by itself to make sure this is the culprit of the failed sync?
do we have troubleshooting logs from the mobile device attempting to sync?
are you in discussions with Esri tech support as well?

Mondi_GIS · ‎11-17-2022

Hi Glen,

Thanks for the questions. As it stands currently:

- We run script 1 which does an ETL from our editing GDB to a publishing SDE GDB and processes a view which appends attributes. This truncates and appends the table in the publishing SDE but maintains the globalIDs. THis is published to our on Prem enterprise.

- A second script (which was developed by ESRI SA) checks for geometry changes between our Feature service on Prem and the Feature Service on AGOL. It then makes the Geometry changes and then updates the attributes.

Previously our script to AGOL would truncate and append but it triggered this bug (BUG-000135310 ). We have never managed to get the distributed collaboration to work on this layer either, and we couldn't tell if it was because the portal is not public facing or the size of the layer caused issues - the errors tended towards size restrictions.

I have just tested again in a new map since we republished this "problem layer" with the new script. It is definitely that layer causing grief.

By troubleshooting logs - do you mean switching on developer mode and extracting logs, or just the sync error message. I haven't tried extracting the logs but could do this.

This issue has been going on for months and months now, and yes, ESRI support in SA has been assisting - we had hoped that by stopping the trunc and append approach to AGOL, it would solve this problem.

AdamBerenzweig · ‎05-29-2023

[I solved my own problem while writing this up, but thought someone else might find it useful. But there's a secondary question below that maybe someone can chime in on.]

Background:
- I have a map that I made public and available for offline sync. I tried to make it publicly editable as well, but that doesn't seem to be working -- when an anonymous user opens the map, the map is viewable but there is no "+" icon to create a new point and existing points aren't editable.
- While signed in and offline, I made some edits. Once back online, sync failed. See below for the detailed error.
- I don't recall the exact sequence of events, but I may have created and downloaded the map areas before making the map public. If so that may be causing the problems. [yes, it appears so...]

The specific error I'm seeing is:
--
Unable to synchronize replica.
Details:
No permission to sync replica : <...>. jobId:- <..>, orgId:- <...> user:-
---
I've omitted the replica, job and orgId above, but note that there is no user ID shown in the logs. Maybe that's relevant?

Troubleshooting:
1. I tried signing out of Field Maps and back in again, no help.
2. I went back and made the map private, then re-published the offline map area. SUCCESS! I was then able to sync the local edits.
3. I tried again to make the map public, this time re-publishing the offline map area and syncing to Field Maps before attempting to make offline edits. Sync failed again, but now that I didn't have any local edits to preserve, I just deleted the map area and re-downloaded it. Success! Now it seems to edit and sync fine.

A secondary question: If I hadn't been able to fix this, is there any way to recover the data I collected without having ArcGIS Pro? The articles I see about manual sync include a step to convert the runtime geodatabase into a file geodatabase using ArcGIS Pro. I use a mac so that's not an option for me.

Rayn · ‎11-02-2023

Hi Glenn,

I'm having the same issue and I have read through this and i am able to recover the data but my users are still out in the field and i don't see how to get them back on track with the replica? i have been creating new offline areas myself and editing offline and then trying to sync them but they are still not coming through? How do i resolve this so we can all start syncing again? One crew in the field never had any issues and is still sending in edits so not sure why myself and the other crew cannot.

thanks!

GlenShepherd · ‎11-16-2023

Hi @Rayn,

Can we confirm the following are true? :

Your users are in the field and have un-synced edits, presumably due to some issue with their downloaded replica (offline map area).
You've created new offline map areas, and they download successfully, however the edits we're making won't sync.
One member of your field staff is still able to successfully submit edits with the original offline map area...

Can you expand upon the following:

Are we editing a standard hosted feature layer? (i.e. not a view layer, or an ArcGIS Server service?)
Are there any differences between the user-type/role of the field users edits who are failing, vs. the field user who is having success?
Is this issue on-going? (sorry for the late response!)

Rayn · ‎11-17-2023

Hi Glen,

1. Correct, the users in the field are downloading offline areas, making edits, and syncing back but nothing is making it back into the data on my end.

2. I have tested by making and publishing new features, creating and downloading offline areas, and then attempting to sync back with the same behavior.

3. I confirmed that she was just not using the offline areas, so its confirmed this is just not working for anyone.

4. The data is coming from sde, traditional versioning and archiving turned on, publishing to enterprise 11.1

5. everyone is a data editor

6. i have tested with traditional versioning turned off and it works so i have just turned it off for the feature datasets that are affected by the field work.

The main issue i am still confused about is that i did not change anything on my end and the process was working just fine (with traditional versioning turned on). we did upgrade to 11.1 right around the time this happened so i wonder if that had an effect. Id like to maintain versioning but im being told i need to run an additional reconcile and post to make it work now? i never did this previously.

thanks!

JoabelBarbieri · ‎11-22-2023

I found a big bug that was making offline maps fail to download and even failing to package in the Field Maps Designer. DO NOT USE VECTOR SYMBOLOGY !!!

Once I used Basic Symbols it worked again !