Hi @CraigGillgrass, thanks for the quick reply.
I am currently designing a geodatabase where I want users to be able to manage data with a time validity.
The goal is to be able to keep historical, current and planned features for analytical and statistical purposes, but also for planning tasks related to the features, while also being as easy to use and maintain as possible.
I looked into using archiving, but from what I understand, it doesn't fulfill my needs completely.
Since archiving uses transaction time and not valid time, there could be unwanted time differences.
For example, I want to be able to compare how different areas looked last year, right now and next year.
https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/3.3/help/data/geodatabases/overview/the-archive-process.htm
I also looked at branch versioning as a candidate for handling planned features, which would be posted to default closer to the date where the new features were to become valid. This would add overhead to the users since they would need to handle the reconciling and posting to default. There could still be some lag between the actual valid date and the transaction.
Another issue is that there can only be one editor per named branch version. So multiple users won't be able to edit planned features at the same time, unless using multiple branch versions, which would make comparison between historical and planned features more complex.
A possible way of handling this that I have been testing would be to simply have a validFrom and validTo field for my features and edit them in the default version.
That way I could handle historical, current and planned features. It would make it very easy to compare data between different set of dates, I would simply filter out features that aren't valid within the selected date.
It would also make it quite easy for non-GIS-users to help maintain the data, simply by handling the validFrom and validTo fields.
From what I have tested so far, this works in desktop and in web (excluding web editor). I can use the timeslider to look at a specific date in time and see the data how it looked then or will look in the future. For statistical purposes I would filter out features based on validFrom and validTo dates.
Since ArcGIS Web Editor does not have support for time aware layers, this way of handling the data does not seem to work, and I suspect that it's not according to best practice, but from what I understand it seems to fulfill my needs the best.
I don't have much experience with branch versioning or archiving, so maybe there is a way to achieve the wanted result that I don't know about. Any ideas?
Best regards
