Branch versioning and/or archiving system needed for ArcGIS Datastore

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08-12-2022 03:15 PM
Status: Open
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RandyCasey
Occasional Contributor II

The Datastore in ArcGIS Enterprise works really great and allows for more responsive layers, especially in field applications. But the issue that I find is making me hesitate when deciding whether to publish a feature class as a hosted feature service or as referenced feature class from an Enterprise Geodatabase, is edit and update control, or rather how edits and updates are ultimately reconciled to the base dataset.

With an EGDB referenced feature service, you can turn on branch versioning and assign specific users their own branch version. When they have completed edits, they have to have that branch reconciled to the base. This is typically done by an administrator, but even if not, this process allows for a QA/QC checkpoint to occur, allow for one last stop to check for accidental data loss. And if this QA/QC checkpoint fails for some reason, with archiving turned on, it may be possible to recover lost data. This system makes EGDB based systems the best for data integrity.

But with hosted feature services, there is no option for either of these: branch reconciliation or archiving. Meaning that any edits are live (or in the case of offline syncing, once synced, they are live) with no safety net for data loss. For ArcGIS Enterprise managers like myself who oversee hundreds of authoritative datasets, that concept makes me incredibly squeamish. If just one of these features could be added, that would be great. If both could be added, that would be phenomenal!