Publishing UN as a Feature Service

[NathanHeickLACSD]

What forces you into publishing your UN as a feature service to edit it?  Can you edit a UN in ArcSDE if it is not versioned?  Is branch versioning the only thing that forces you into publishing your UN as a feature service?  I understand the general concepts of the UN being service-oriented, but I'm trying to understand how the software forces you from editing a UN in a FGDB into editing a UN in a feature service with branch versioning.

[RobertKrisher]

This article should help answer these questions: To Branch or Not to Branch - An Introduction to Branch Versioning. The only additional context you need to know is that when a utility network is in an enterprise geodatabase, it must be registered as branch versioned in order to be edited.

[gis_KIWI4 · Accepted solution]

@NathanHeickLACSD - Branch versioning is one aspect of it but if you look at the way the ESRI's architecture evolution is going, you can tell this is the logical step. 

Arcmap relied on a lot of client-side processing. It managed the rules, version states, etc locally. This comes with may drawbacks. Performance depends on the end-users machine, integrations are rigid, etc. 

Modern applications need to be system agnostic so that they can provide flexibility for integration and customization. Services based architecture enable all of this. 

Imagine you are editing your UN on a ipad. All the ipad is doing is sending REST commands and the UN service does all the heavy lifting of verifying rules, network validation, writing the changes to the database, etc. This is inline with the route that ESRI is taking - UN Editing capabilities in web editor is a prime example of this.

Integrations are so much easier and robust with a modern platform like this.

I think ESRI decision making is based on 
-Future Proofing
-Flexibility 
-Performance
-Reliability
-Ease on Integrations

[NathanHeickLACSD]

Is the following accurate then?

1.  UNs in enterprise geodatabases require branch versioning to edit.  Branch versioning is only available through ArcGIS Enterprise and enables multiuser editing.  The libraries that make the updates to the RDBMS are in ArcGIS Enterprise.  ArcGIS Pro, web, and mobile clients use the same patterns to edit through web services.

2.  UNs in file or mobile geodatabases are inherently single-user.  Editing these geodatabases requires libraries that are only available in ArcGIS Pro or the Runtime.  The client modifies the file-based geodatabases.

[RobertKrisher]

Mostly, except for the piece about libraries only existing in certain places. The different applications (ArcGIS Enterprise, Pro, etc) have libraries that allow them to read/write the data in the geodatabase. If you want to edit data in a geodatabase outside of these applications (your own application, script, or interface) you can either use one of the SDKs (including APIs for the rest interfaces) or libraries (like ArcPy) that Esri provides.