ArcGIS Pro/AGOL

[ToddHill]

Hello ESRI Community,

I'm trying to find the best workflow with updating water utility layers after I collect them using a GPS unit. My current workflow now is when a new water utility feature is added I go out and collect the new feature(s) pull the data off of my AGOL account, insert the new features in ArcGIS Pro, make all updated changes needed for that utility feature(s).

Once this has been completed my local file geodatabase is updated then my next step is to get AGOL updated. In the past I would just overwrite the AGOL layer with the new layer but recently I have found that some of my Surveys get screwed up when I do that. I have a few surveys that are hyperlinked to hydrant maintenance, hydrant flushing and hydrant winter checks. 

The above workflow has always worked for me over the years but I think I may be able to do away with a step without screwing up the surveys that have been linked.

Thanks for any help in advance,

Todd

[clt_cabq]

its sounds to me like there are a couple of areas you could benefit from if possible. First would be to be working with an Enterprise Geodatabase that is published as a REST Service from ArcGIS Enterprise/Server. That way the updates to your field collected data are being made straight to the source. This starts to get technically more challenging if you have multiple people making edits but its manageable since that is the point of the Enterprise database. Alternatively, you can use your AGOL feature layer(s) in ArcGIS Pro almost as if they were part of an enterprise GDB, but you would need to make sure you have a backup strategy and some way to automate that on a pretty regular basis. 

The other life improvement you can make is to have your Survey (I suspect you are using Survey123 to collect data?) integrated with the Enterprise Geodatabase, often people create a survey that works against a separate database and then you have to go through steps to update your main database, sort of in the way you are doing things now, and that is inefficient and risky. Search for articles either in help or the forums on 'integrating survey123 with an existing feature class'

Ultimately, you want to get to a place where you are minimizing the amount of times you are moving or copying data between sources.