How to Increase Text Field Size without Losing Data

[Billy]

Hi,

We have a published survey that we need to increase a text field size. When we set the new size on the esri:fieldLength in Connect and then try to re-publish we get a warning that the data will be lost.

How can we increase the size of the text field without losing the data?

Survey123 Connect version: 3.14.256

Survey published to ArcGIS Online.

Regards.

[JohannesLindner]

I don't know how to do it in AGOL, but here's how you would do it in the Desktop environments, maybe it's similar...

• create a temporary text field with at least the size of the original text field
• copy all values from the text field to the temporary text field
• recreate the text field with the new size
• copy all values from the temporary text field to the recreated text field
• delete the temporary text field
• republish

[shan_sarkar]

In ArcGIS desktop you can simply increase the field length without having to create a temporary field.  The temporary field comes into play if you need to decrease the field size.

Refer Modify field properties

[JohannesLindner]

Huh, seems like I wrongly remembered my struggles with changing field length... That's good to know, thanks for the tip!

[DerrickWestoby]

I don't think you remembered incorrectly, @JohannesLindner ...I think this behavior changed within the last year.