Editor settings for hosted feature services

When you publish a hosted feature service on ArcGIS Online, you can choose whether the features can be edited, what types of edits are allowed, and who can update and delete features.

Accessing editor settings

To access the editor settings for hosted feature services, follow these steps:

1. Publish a hosted feature service on ArcGIS Online.
2. Log in to the ArcGIS.com website and click My Content.
3. Click the name of your feature service to view its item details.
4. Click the Edit button.
5. Scroll down to view and modify the editor settings, which are in the Editing and Track Edits sections of the page.

Enabling editing on the service

To enable editing, follow the steps above and check Enable editing and allow editors to:. Then choose one of the allowed editing levels.

• Add, update, and delete features gives editors the most privileges of the three choices. Consequently, this setting requires the most trust of your editors to respect each others' edits.
• Update feature attributes only is useful when you want editors to enter attribute information without changing any feature geometry. For example, you might have a set of observation towers whose locations should not be allowed to change, but whose attributes may be updated regularly.
• Add features only is useful if you want users to be able to report something to you but not delete or update existing features.

Tip:

You can allow editors to attach images and other files with the feature. To do this, find the Layers section of the item details page, click the small arrow icon next to the layer where you want to allow attachments, and choose Enable attachments. Choose Disable attachments if you no longer want to allow images and other files on the features. The file can be up to 10 MB in size.

If your editors will occasionally be disconnected from the network, check Enable Sync. This allows your editors to get the latest updates to features at the time they connect. Any edits they made to features while disconnected will also be applied at the time they connect. Sync is currently only supported in ArcGIS for Windows Mobile.

Opening the service with full editing control

When viewing your hosted feature service from within the map viewer, you can choose to have full control of the data regardless of the editing level you have set. For example, if you set the service to allow adding features only, you can update and delete features. This is useful if you need to curate or clean up a map that others are editing.

To enable full control, open the hosted feature service item details page, click the Open button and click Open with full editing control. The full control option only applies to hosted feature service layers you own or for which you are an administrator, and only when viewing in the map viewer. If your service already allows full editing, you won't see this option in the Open menu.

Tracking edits and restricting control to those who created a feature

You can have ArcGIS Online keep track of who created the features in the feature service, and restrict access accordingly. To track the edits, follow the steps above and check Keep track of who created and last updated features.

In some scenarios, you may want to allow someone to delete or modify the features they created, but not delete or modify others' features. This might be the case with volunteered geographic information (VGI) applications in which you want to limit the control each contributor has over the database. To restrict feature modification to just the person who created the feature, check Editors can only update and delete the features they add.

Edits are not tracked if you choose to make the service public.