A Legend's Symbol Label Displays in the Pop-up Instead of Its Value

[KeithWitt]

This took me a while to figure out so I thought others might be having the same problem since there's no mention of it in the help. Pop-ups in AGOL web maps display a feature service's legend symbol ???label??? instead of its ???value??? if they are different in Desktop but not when the label of a symbol is changed in the web map instead of in Desktop. Conversely, if you change the label of a symbol in the web map that differed from the value in Desktop it will still display the label format. This is problematic because I want the legend of my feature service to be in proper case and the pop-up values to be in lower case without having duplicate fields.

Background: I have a text field of polygon attributes that contains a one-word designation for a county???s economic status (e.g. ???distressed???). In my geodatabase, the values are in lower case so that I can use them in a sentence in the pop-up. In ArcGIS 10.1, when I change the legend label for the value in Layer Properties> Symbology from ???distressed??? to ???Distressed??? so that the legend displays it in proper case (first letter in caps), the pop-up shows the word in proper case instead of the lower case value form. Luckily, the new table view displays the value and not the label.

Work-Around: One option is to upload the feature service without changing the legend label in Desktop and then changing the label of each symbol in the web map. Another option is to create separate fields for the pop-up and legend labels.

Bottom line: Maybe Esri could add a check box to "Configure Attributes" in AGOL to display the value versus the label in pop-ups, similar to how alias field names are managed in Desktop.

[MikeMinami]

This is true. It's a side effect of how we edit data. When you symbolize with unique values, we use those values by default when editing. So for example, if you symbolize based on type of tree, and you have tree type codes of 1, 2 and 3, and you change the legend label to show orange, grapefruit and lemon tree, we will show these values associated with the types you can add when editing the data instead of the tree code number. Thus, the label displays as the attribute value too to match.

The fact that the table is not reflecting this seems like a bug to me. We should probably be consistently displaying the same value. It's unlikely that we'll expose a configuration option for this on the popup configuration.

Thanks

Mike