ArcPad 10.2.2 Feature Service Fails with Editor Tracking Enabled

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02-06-2015 12:58 PM
ZacharyHart
Occasional Contributor III

ArcPad 10.2.2 Feature Service Fails with Editor Tracking Enabled

BUG-000085108 - Incorrect synchronization results in ArcPad 10.2.2 when Editor Tracking is enabled

Hey there, not sure of a better place to add this. Just like the title says. We upgraded and had some very unusual behavior syncing including those using mobile devices having AP crash after syncing and changes not being pulled own. The desktop version of AP had odd behavior as well. Just posting this as a heads up.

The ArcPad support services team was (as usual) great to work with in diagnosing this issue. But it does represent a bit deal to our organization. We had a couple of options in front of us but none were ideal. The fixes/upgrades to 10.2.2 are certainly worth staying at that version.

So my workaround is going to be authoring projects for our users which have Quick Fields ‌in place which will populate fields for user name and the date. Even though I'll have to modify the schema of our data to support these new fields, there are certain advantages to this method. Anyone who's worked with with editor tracking knows that if you've had to load data or work with replicated data, you know that Editor Tracking isn't bulletproof in terms of capturing the data creator permanently. As a bonus, we'll be collecting X & Y data at the time of data creation too. Wish I had known about this before.

Hope this saves someone a bit of trouble!

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8 Replies
JosephMootz1
Occasional Contributor

Thanks for this post. We have struggled with this issue also. Glad to get confirmation there is an issue. This saves us some trouble trying to figure out what is going on.

We can probably get by without editor tracking and  Checking the "Suppress Synchronization Downloads" as suggested in the comments on this post Sync with Feature Services in ArcPad 10.2 | ArcGIS Blog This will prevent us from downloading updates during synch so we will only be able to upload which is and acceptable work around at this time. Long term we would like to see this issue addressed so we can have the full functionality we want.

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ZacharyHart
Occasional Contributor III

Actually here's a bit of an update which may or may not affect you. I have a new incident number which was spawned from the problem I previously described. Its now "ArcPad 10.2.2 crashes when performing a synchronization from a Windows Mobile device." Specifically it seems that line data is the culprit here. Syncs fine with the desktop version of ArcPad, but not on a mobile device. ESRI is able to replicate the behavior with their own data.

The analyst's testing has been very thorough and seems related to the sync.js file as there were some changes made at 10.2.2, and they've been working with the ArcPad Team directly.

While I'm certainly pleased with Support Services, our organization is thoroughly disappointed in the software itself. You point out that "Long term we would like to see this issue addressed so we can have the full functionality we want." However, I'm taking the view that this is advertised functionality that we have paid for to work; a more binary perspective. It either works, or it doesn't.

Anyway, if you are having further difficulties related to sync even with Editor Tracking disabled, you're likely in the same boat, and I'd be happy to channel the information to the people currently working on this issue.

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JosephMootz1
Occasional Contributor

Thanks for the follow up. We are using desktop ArcPad 10.2.2 on a Windows laptop device. The Synchronization works fine without editor tracking enabled, although functionally it downloads all records every time since there is no Edit Date to tell what has changed, i.e. we get the "Incremental downloads not available.." message. We have a lot of records so we Suppress downloads to disable that function and keep the synchronization time to a minimum.

When Editor Tracking is enabled, it seems that the first time we try to synch it deletes all records in the axf. Then the next time it downloads all records from the server and adds them back in to the axf. Messages from subsequent synchronizations indicate all records are edited. This seems to be the most consistent behavior.

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ZacharyHart
Occasional Contributor III

That isn't the exact behavior we witnessed, but it is similar. FWIW, ESRI tells me that synchronization with ArcPad doesn't actually utilize editor tracking in how it transacts changes; it used another ID within the .axf file. As I recall the cause for editor tracking fouling up the ArcPad sync was due to how the time values were being handled; I'd have to check back through my emails to be sure (there's been a whole lot related to ArcPad over the last few months).

Unfortunately, the plot thickens and I come bearing bad news, and it may be worthy of updating the title of the thread or creating a new one (please give me suggestions on how you'd like me to handle this).

BUG-000085938 - ArcPad 10.2.2 crashes w/out error when synchronizing line features on a GPS device running Windows Mobile/Windows Embedded Handheld  [EDIT: to be clear, as a result of the crash, both the line & point feature classes fail to sync correctly and no updates are pulled down from the server to the handheld.]

Points in 10.2.2 do sync with Editor Tracking Disabled (please my above reference for using Quick Fields as an alternative). So, if you're only syncing point data, you're probably good to go.

Needless to say, we're thoroughly disappointed. I hope these posts save someone a bit of headache.

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GISAdmin25
New Contributor II

I have rolled back to ArcPad 10.2.1.  I do see the benefits of the new version,  and we may make use of it for some applications.  However, we have an application in production on tablet pc's that has been working well for us, and this new version breaks the sync on our line feature class.  We like having Editor tracking enabled to reduced the data transferred.

Matt

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GISTeam2
New Contributor II

Hi folks,

I have just come across the issue of incremental downloads (or lack of) and think they are not supported in the software and applications I am using (ArcGIS Server 10, ArcPad server extension and ArcPad 10.0). We are now thinking of migrating to later versions to try and overcome this issue. I appreciate the comments above about bugs and the incremental download functionality not working yet, but with the later application versions how are you supposed to turn the editor tracking functionality on, is it a property of the feature service or a setting in ArcPad ?

AJ

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JosephMootz1
Occasional Contributor

Editor tracking is enabled on the geodatabase Feature Dataset. This will add the necessary fields to the feature classes for editor tracking .When features are created or modified the editor tracking fields are updated automatically.  The following links describe the setup for 10.2.

About tracking an editor's changes to data

Enabling and managing editor tracking

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GISTeam2
New Contributor II

Thanks, will try that when we are set up

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