Registering a Feature Class as Versioned

Registering a Feature Class as Versioned

Throughout this lesson, we'll use a feature class that stores the boundaries of the United States at the time of its first decennial census in 1790. We'll make edits to this feature class that reflect changes in the state boundaries as new states were admitted to the union.

A. Transferring data from your computer to your Amazon instance

Again, you are going to transfer some data from your machine to your Amazon enterprise geodatabase instance. This time, it will be the US_state_1790 shapefile dataset that you download from the Checklist page.

1. Start your instance using the AWS Console.
2. Open a Remote Desktop Connection to your instance. In doing so, make certain that the box for Drives is checked via Options > Local Resources > More button.
3. In your remote desktop connection window, open File Explorer. (Start button > All Programs > Windows System> File Explorer) and, as a reminder, click This PC to display the drives that are attached to the Windows operating system.
   Under Devices and drives, you should see listed a set of drives (C and D) for your EC2 instance, and you should see the drives that are on your own local computer.
   
   You are going to Copy-Paste a shapefile dataset from your computer to the data folder on the Local Disk (D:) drive on your instance. You might want to open a second File Explorer window.
4. Note the two alternatives to this step:
   Browse to the folder on your local computer that contains the US_state_1790 shapefile dataset. Highlight all of the files comprising the shapefile datasets, and click Copy.
   Alternatively, you could highlight the single nhgis0001_shapefile_us_state_1790.zip file (remembering to uncompress it after the transfer).
5. Browse to within the D:/data drive and Paste the shapefile dataset there. If you uploaded the .zip archive, be sure to extract its contents.

B. Register a feature class as versioned

First, you will import the shapefile to your enterprise geodatabase as a feature class, then you'll perform the registration. Throughout this lesson, we'll use the census and Moe users established back in Lesson 6. In an actual implementation of a project like this, you would likely want to load the data via a loader user (like census) and then grant editing privileges to two non-loader users; but for simplicity's sake, we'll just grant editing privileges to Moe and use census as the second editor.

1. In the remote connection window to your instance, open ArcGIS Pro and via the Catalog pane import the US_state_1790 shapefile through the census_egdb connection.
   Note: You are not importing to a feature dataset; right-click on the census_edgb connection and choose Import > Feature Class.
   • For the Output Feature Class, assign a name of us_state_1790.
     
     We're really only interested in storing the state names in this simple scenario, so we'll not import the rest of the non-essential attribute fields. Do the following.
   • In the Field Map area of the dialog, one at a time, select each field except STATENAM, SHAPE_AREA and SHAPE_LEN, and click the X button to remove the selected field from the field map.
   • Click Run to carry out the import. The new feature class will be added to the current map when the import is complete. The layer name should be egdb.CENSUS.US_state_1790.
2. Recalling the steps that should be completed after a new feature class is added to a geodatabase, let's perform an Analyze on it and assign the desired access privileges.
   Run the Analyze Datasets tool on the new feature class (ArcToolbox > Data Management Tools> Geodatabase Administration).
3. We want the Moe user to have the ability to edit this feature class too, so let's set up that privilege.
   Using the Change Privileges tool, grant both view and edit privileges to the us_state_1790 feature class for the user Moe.
4. Now, right-click on egdb.CENSUS.us_state_1790 in the Catalog pane, and select Manage > Register As Versioned.
   • Leave the "Register the selected objects with the option to move edits to base" box unchecked and
   • click OK.

The feature class is now ready for versioned editing. The decision on whether to use a versioned editing workflow is made at the feature class level unless the feature class is part of a feature dataset. In that case, you would register the feature dataset as versioned, and that setting would cascade to all of its feature classes.  Note that the setting applies only to feature classes in the feature dataset at that time.  If you later add a new feature class to the feature dataset, you'll need re-execute the Register As Versioned command.  Further details in this Tech Support article.