ArcGIS Online July 2015 Update

[MikeMinami]

You may have noticed some changes to ArcGIS Online today as last night we released an update. Have a look at this blog post to get a sense of what's new. 

[ThomasColson]

And not all of the changes were good ones. Seems like administrative editing of a service via the REST admin URL has been disabled, didn't see that listed in the new changes? How to reproduce:

Go to

https://services1.arcgis.com/some org code/ArcGIS/rest/admin/services/YOUR_SERVICE/FeatureServer/0/updateDefinition?token=SOME TOKEN

Double-quote the edit date

Change something about the schema:

...and then observe how nothing was changed:

[NikhilShampur]

Tom,

No changes to the ability to use update definition to make changes. Note:- Some changes are not allowed - e.g. updating the lastEditDate, field type (these were never supported even earlier)

Can you verify that other actions like changing the alias of the field work as expected.

[ThomasColson]

That's incorrect: Per Updating Hosted Feature Services in ArcGIS Online | ArcGIS Blog and ESRI tech support, double-quoting the last edit date is required for the json edit to post. Not doing so results in the following error:

{

  "error" :

  {

  "code" : 400,

  "message" : "Unable to update feature service layer definition.",

  "details" : [

  "Invalid definition for 'LastEditDate'."

  ]

  }

}

[NikhilShampur]

Tom,

Yes the lastEditDate cannot be specified as part of the payload. It either needs to be "null" or an empty string.

[ThomasColson]

By double-quoting the editdata, I am able to change field alias', but not nullability. From http://blogs.esri.com/esri/arcgis/files/2014/10/How-to-Update-Hosted-Feature-Service-Schemas1.pdf , the chapter Field Properties, it appears that changing the null value is possible, and WAS possible yesterday, not today after the update...

[NikhilShampur]

Tom,

Updating the nullability of fields via updateDefinition is not supported and never was.

One way of achieving this is to use the deleteDefinition to drop the field and then re-add the column with a nullable type. Note:- This does lose any existing data in the column.

[ThomasColson]

"Some changes are not allowed - e.g. updating the lastEditDate, field type (these were never supported even earlier)" is incorrect, even after the update, double-quoting the editdatefield was and is required for the json edit to post, which is why I'm dubious that editing other field attributes and turning off sync "was never supported", as I'm pretty positive I was able to perform those two tasks before the update.

[deleted-user-LNABNwA5CZcD]

Was there ever a solution figured out for this? Can the nullability not be changed? I'm having a NIGHTMARE of a time with this right now trying to change something that I previously didn't want nullable to now be able to be nullable...

[ThomasColson]

Seems like the update is breaking a few things: Why can't Sync be disabled from a Feature Service, once its been enabled.