For what reasons would a service definition leave out features?

[Anonymous User]

While publishing some feature classes from our enterprise geodatabase to ArcGIS Online (AGOL) as hosted feature services, I ran into a strange problem.  One particular feature class will publish to AGOL apparently without error, but the majority of the features will have empty geometry.  I have tried publishing from both ArcMap10.5 and Pro 2.0 with the same result.  

It is not the limitation on records returned from the server because this feature class only contains 15 features.  However, the 15 features are multi-part features.  

As a workaround, I tried creating a service definition using the geoprocessing tools and then publishing a service from that, but encountered the same result of empty geometry.  

Interestingly, if this same feature class is published to our federated ArcServer with the data copied to the server's managed database, the resulting feature service turns up in our Portal completely intact, no empty geometry.  

I am curious as to what is causing the empty geometry in the first place, and why the AGOL service ends up with empty geometry but the ArcServer service does not.  Does anyone have any ideas as to a cause? Could the multi-part features be be a problem?

[Anonymous User]

If I had to guess it is related to the multi-part features (https://community.esri.com/thread/183547-how-to-add-multipart-polygons-in-agol )

I imagine geometry is freaking out because a multi-part feature (obviously) has multiple geometries and the database engine in AGOL doesn't know how to handle those geometries. 

As a test, if you make a copy of your dataset, explode those multipart features in the copy and attempt to publish it up to AGOL, does it work?

[Anonymous User · Accepted solution]

After working with ESRI support, we found that the problem was related to the multi-part features.  The issue wasn't that multi-part features in general were a problem, but that these specific features were too complex for AGO.  Exploding the features before uploading does work, but for our specific project we need to pursue a different option.