Transfer Data from Old to New Survey

Billy · ‎01-11-2021

Hi,

I need to make some changes to my survey that could cause a service republishing, like increasing the length of a text question and change the data type of some questions (from string to integer).

I'm looking for a solution to be able to create a new survey with the changes mentioned above, and then append the old data to the new survey. The data in field that needs to be change from string to integer are numbers stored as text.

BarbaraWebster1 · ‎01-12-2021

Hi Billy,

There are a few ways you could approach this:

1. Use the Append Geoprocessing tool in ArcPro to append the data from the original survey layer to the new survey layer.

Note - This method has a more robust handling of global ids, so it is preferable to the second approach described here (appending via ArcGIS Online) if your data has repeats or attachments.

Here is a video that demos this method of appending.

Also if you have editor tracking enabled, this post discusses a way to preserve those values.

2. Use the Update Data>Append Data to Layer option in ArcGIS Online to append the data from the original survey layer to the new survey layer.

This knowledge base article includes the procedure for this method. Note that in order to maintain relationships, sync must be disabled, and that while this article says that attachments will be maintained, there are instances where this is not the case.

3. Another option for changing the field length or field type of a field is to create a new field within the existing feature layer, populate it with the original field contents, delete the original field, create a new field with the same name as the original field but with the desired field length/field type, and populate it with the data from the holding field.

Thanks,
-Barbara

View solution in original post

BarbaraWebster1 · ‎01-12-2021

Hi Billy,

There are a few ways you could approach this:

1. Use the Append Geoprocessing tool in ArcPro to append the data from the original survey layer to the new survey layer.

Note - This method has a more robust handling of global ids, so it is preferable to the second approach described here (appending via ArcGIS Online) if your data has repeats or attachments.

Here is a video that demos this method of appending.

Also if you have editor tracking enabled, this post discusses a way to preserve those values.

2. Use the Update Data>Append Data to Layer option in ArcGIS Online to append the data from the original survey layer to the new survey layer.

This knowledge base article includes the procedure for this method. Note that in order to maintain relationships, sync must be disabled, and that while this article says that attachments will be maintained, there are instances where this is not the case.

3. Another option for changing the field length or field type of a field is to create a new field within the existing feature layer, populate it with the original field contents, delete the original field, create a new field with the same name as the original field but with the desired field length/field type, and populate it with the data from the holding field.

Thanks,
-Barbara

Billy · ‎01-12-2021

Thanks.

kkoz490 · ‎01-13-2021

Has the preserve global IDs option bug been fixed? I have reported that the global IDs are changed when you append records>

BarbaraWebster1 · ‎01-14-2021

Hi Kevin,

It looks like there is still a bug for the preserve global ID option in the Append tool in ArcPro.

https://support.esri.com/en/bugs/nimbus/QlVHLTAwMDEwMTUyOA==

-Barbara

kkoz490 · ‎01-15-2021

Hello Barbara,

Thank you for the link to the bug post. I think I was one of the first to report it. What I have been trying to do is append data from one Agol hosted feature service to a new hosted feature service with the preserve the Global IDs. I did check, and all of the Global IDs in the services have unique indexes.

So that bug report may not be referring to Agol hosted feature services.

Kevin