using updateFeatures to update attributes from dictionary

[DShokes]

I can update features from the updateFeatures REST page with the following:

/* This is a valid updateFeatures parameter */
[{"attributes" : {"OBJECTID": 3325, "Name" : null}},
{"attributes" : {"OBJECTID": 152504, "Name" : "Joe Smith"}}]

ArcREST's layer function to updateFeatures only appears to update from fully built feature objects. No error is thrown when the features parameter only contains attributes. updateFeatures succeeds but only returns {'updateResults': []} instead of {'updateResults': [{'objectId': 3325, 'globalId': None, 'success': True}, {'objectId': 152504, 'globalId': None, 'success': True}]}

Here is my workaround, but it would be nice to allow attribute updates from the function:

"""
dict1 - is a dictionary of hosted features. Values have been changed to match a different data source.
list_CustomerIDs -  is a list. It lists the dict1 keys which are used to update specific features
attributes - is a list of dicts of individual feature attribute updates
"""
attributes = [{"attributes":{"OBJECTID":dict1[key][4],"Name":dict1[key][0],"CustomerID":dict1[key][1],"Address":dict1[key][3]}} for key in list_CustomerIDs]
# setup initial params dict
params = {"f" : "json", "rollbackOnFailure" : True}
result = None
 # There should be a check here to make sure the attributes has at least the feature layer OID or GlobalID
if len(attributes) > 0:
        #add features key:values
        # using json dumps here change syntax from python to json (None to null, escape special characters, etc...)
        params['features'] = json.dumps(attributes)
        params['token'] = fl._token
        uurl= fl.url + "/updateFeatures"
        result = fl._do_post(url=uurl, param_dict=params, proxy_port=fl._proxy_port, proxy_url=fl._proxy_url)
        print result
        # {'updateResults': [{'objectId': 152504, 'globalId': None, 'success': True}, {'objectId': 3325, 'globalId': None, 'success': True}]}

It would be nice to just call:

fl.updateFeatures(attributes)

My code above is a little too workflow specific, but updateFeatures could take a list of dicts of field:attribute like:

attributeUpdates = [{"OBJECTID":3325,"Name":None},{"OBJECTID":152504,"Name":"Jeff's Grocery Store"}]
#build features param for post
params['features'] =[{"attributes":{fields:values for fields,values in row.iteritems()} for fields,values in row.iteritems()} for row in attributeUpdates]
#Results in [{'attributes': {'Name': None, 'OBJECTID': 3325}}, {'attributes': {'Name': "Jeff's Grocery Store", 'OBJECTID': 152504}}]

Hope this is useful

[achapkowski]

Thank you for the suggestion. We will consider it for the next major release, but at this time, we will not add this feature. I am going to go ahead and close this issue.