External Attachments with Reference Link to Enterprise Geodatabase for Survey123

[NaeimBabaii]

Enhancement Request: External Attachments with Reference Link to Enterprise Geodatabase for Survey123

Background:

Currently, enterprise Survey123 and FieldMaps store associated photos and attachments within the related feature service file in the enterprise geodatabase (SDE). While this solution works for surveys with limited photos and attachments, it becomes problematic for larger datasets.

Use Case:

Chevron has developed surveys that capture thousands of inspections, with forms containing up to 650 unique questions and requirements for multiple photos and attachments. This results in a significant amount of data being captured daily. The associated feature class has grown to 25-30GB and continues to increase. The expanding size of these feature services within the enterprise geodatabase is causing instability and performance issues, necessitating continuous expansion of the enterprise SDE structure.

Proposed Solution:

We request the ability to register external cloud database storage with a reference link to be used by Survey123/FieldMaps feature services. This external cloud database can be registered during the publishing process of Survey123/FieldMaps and serve as a repository for all photos and attachments.

@JamesTedrick @JonMurphy 

[ArthurSmith]

This would be a valuable enhancement!  Beyond the storage bloat concerns raised by the OP, this would be great to allow consumption of photos collected in Survey123 in other systems.  There are many workflows where data is collected in Survey123, yet stored and consumed elsewhere.  Allowing configuration of cloud storage photo destination would eliminate need for custom ETL development for these scenarios.

[ECarson]

Yes please, managing the images of users is becoming a bit of a headache now.

[BrandonMol4]

This is so critical. In my organization, we are developing custom middleware to do this (intercept the add attachment REST API call, write the image file elsewhere, and do the opposite on query).  THis should be baked into the product to allow out of row storage of files (images, PDF, etc) to disk, instead of into the ArcGIS Relational Datastore.

[SimonSchütte_ct]

Yes, we have a project with 500.000 attachments at an average size of 2,5MB. This blows up the Enterprise Geodatabase to absurd sizes in relation to the other datasets stored inside. ...And the number of datasets is growing on a daily basis... Being able to externally store the attachments is a must.