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Tracking/Auditing/Safeguarding original GNSS points in AGOL

203
1
2 weeks ago
andysp
by
Occasional Contributor

For those using high-accuracy GNSS receivers, capturing with Field Maps directly into AGOL: how do you safeguard your original points? It's possible to move a point later in ArcGIS Pro, without affecting the metadata (the ESRIGNSS_* fields), so it could be hard to realize that this had happened.

Editor tracking (Keep track of who edited the data) would cause the EditDate timestamp to be modified, but that wouldn't tell you if the point had been moved, or if some non-positional attribute had been changed (not a bad thing: we allow some people to fix typos!).

Pre-Field Maps, we used archiving in the enterprise geodatabase. Is Keep track of changes to the data the AGOL equivalent? (This comment seems to indicate that it's not.)

We do rely on least-privilege permissions - people work against views that are restricted by date and fix type - and that's helpful, but even admins can inadvertently drag-and-drop a selection...

Love to hear about your workflow, if this is a concern in your organization. Thanks!

1 Reply
RyanUthoff
MVP Regular Contributor

There are a couple ways you can track changes to your data.

The first way would be to create an automated process to copy your data from AGOL into a local GDB of some sort. If you ever needed to revert back to an old record, you'd have all of the historical data.

The second way would be to take advantage of the Extract Changes functionality. The support articles I listed below are referring to ArcGIS Enterprise, but you can also enable Extract Changes on an AGOL feature service as well.

https://developers.arcgis.com/rest/services-reference/enterprise/extract-changes-feature-service/

https://support.esri.com/en-us/knowledge-base/how-to-enable-extract-changes-on-hosted-referenced-fea...

https://support.esri.com/en-us/knowledge-base/how-to-recover-deleted-feature-from-a-hosted-feature-l...

https://community.esri.com/t5/arcgis-online-questions/hosted-feature-layer-change-log-access/td-p/11...

I've never needed to use Extract Changes before, but I just tried it on an AGOL hosted feature service and the functionality seems to work for me.