How? Editing Domains for Already Published Feature Services that Reference Registered Data Store (SDE) on SQL

[DS_GIS]

We are running Enterprise 10.8.1, SQL Server, running all our work in ArcPro 2.7, and have an SDE  in place that is backing Field Efforts using ArcGIS Collector. In order to increase efficiency in the field we have created multiple coded domains for different fields. It was our goal to ensure that these wouldn't need to be changed in the future as a domain or field being altered is considered a schema change and means the feature service needs to be overwritten or re-published.

Unfortunately, we now need to alter a few of the domains. And, at this point we have over 100 services running from this SDE. I have tried testing to see if we can change the domains without overwriting or re-publishing. Below are the steps I have tested. 

1. Stopping all services that are using a certain domain > Altering the domain > Restarting the services = The result of this is that the changes don't come through and it registers the old domain

2.  Stopping all services that are using a certain domain > creating an entirely new domain > swapping the old domain out for the new in desktop > restarting the service = the result of this is that no domain appears at all. If we stop the service again, and then swap it back to the old domain it will pull the old domain through. 

The other limitation is that we can't edit many of these domains as the feature services will cause schema locks. 

My current thinking is we need to create entirely new domains > assign them to the services 1-by-one > and overwrite them so we don't need to re-add them to all the maps. 

Before we go forward with this I wanted to kindly inquire of this community if anyone else had worked with domains that are published to 'live' data from an SDE? If so, would they happen to have any other suggestions of things I could try to make this more efficient please?

[Joshua-Young]

You may want to try using ArcGIS Pro 2.6 to make these changes. Technically ArcGIS Pro 2.7 is at the 10.9 version when it comes to geodatabases and is expecting to connect to ArcGIS Enterprise 10.9. I just ran into an issue with trying to publish a new feature service from 2.7 to ArcGIS Enterprise 10.8.1. After several days of troubleshooting and digging through log files I found the issue was due to a new attribute rule that was created using 2.7. Apparently when 2.7 created that attribute rule it changed version level of the feature class in the SQL Server enterprise geodatabase and ArcGIS Enterprise 10.8.1 refused to connect to the feature class. Removing the attribute rule in 2.7, going back to ArcGIS Pro 2.6, recreating the attribute rule, and then publishing fixed the problem.

[DS_GIS]

Hello Joshua-Young

Thank you so very much for this information. But, it certainly adds a level of complexity to the issue. I'm the GIS Systems Administrator at our organization and I just pushed out 2.7 a couple weeks ago to our virtual environment. I did not realize that it was expecting to connect to 10.9. I'm assuming if I roll back the install to 2.6 + patches, all our ArcPro Projects that have been upgraded to 2.7 will no longer open due to lack of backwards compatibility. Have you potentially experienced this?

Thank you very much for sharing your learning with me. I'm very grateful. 

[Joshua-Young]

Personally, I would try rolling back to ArcGIS Pro 2.6 on just one computer and test to see if the domain editing and view publishing issues go away. If that resolves the issue then just have that one computer be the publishing/geodatabase maintaining computer. I think all the other computer can stay at ArcGIS Pro 2.7 for consuming and editing feature services. If you do roll back all the computers to 2.6, any projects that were saved using 2.7 will show a warning stating any 2.7 based functionality will be stripped from the project when saved using 2.6. So if you did not use any new 2.7 functionality in the project nothing should be lost.

Here is a link to the ArcGIS Pro compatibility matrix that shows what ArcGIS Enterprise/Geodatabase version each version of ArcGIS Pro is designed to work with I now have this page bookmarked: https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/latest/help/data/geodatabases/overview/client-geodatabase-compatib... 

Since Esri keeps releasing new versions of ArcGIS Pro before the compatible version of ArcGIS Enterprise is released, I wish ArcGIS Pro would have better backwards compatibility.