Share Parcel Fabric (branch versioned) for non-editing purposes

[EmyKeeling1]

We are working on converting to the parcel fabric using a SQL Enterprise geodatabase. We have the parcel fabric established and are editing the data through the branch versioned service. This works well.

My question is, how are other agencies serving this data for general viewing? With our legacy parcels (simple polygons) I created views in the database to join the featureclass with an ownership table. I am reading that using views with branch versioned data is more difficult if not possible. Using the service published for editing in web maps does not allow for viewing historic records and other parcel fabric information.

Has anyone come up with a solution to share their enterprise database parcel fabric data, joined with other tables, for viewing purposes?

[jcarlson]

A query layer can work well enough. And a standard view layer is not too hard once you understand the table structure governing the branch versioning / archiving.

For our organization, we maintain a hosted "copy" of the parcel fabric. That is, we have a hosted feature layer that we sync regularly with the "real" parcel fabric using a Python script. We see a number of benefits to this:

1. The editing service is internal only, providing more reliable performance for staff
2. The public service takes advantage of the shared instance pool and generally performs better for users accessing our web maps
3. The hosted copy layers can have additional fields (assessments, etc) that are unnecessary or unavailable to incorporate into the parcel fabric schema.
4. Attributes from the parent records (date recorded, record name) can be brought into the parcel layers themselves, allowing the web layers to be time-aware.
5. Pausing or deferring the sync process gives us a buffer to correct issues before they hit the public maps

[EmyKeeling1]

Thank you, Josh, for the great reply. You have given me some workflows to think about and research.

Emy Keeling