Best practices when re-publishing data to webmaps to keep your configuration relationships intact

Sometimes when publishing or re-publishing data with Esri technology, ids change and existing layer-extension configuration in your VertiGIS Studio Web (VSW) application is no longer accessible.

Someone recently asked for advice on the best ways to avoid (or recover) from this.

Templates for VSW rely on webmaps that VertiGIS maintains. Here are some of the things we've discovered.

First, we always keep a backup of the content of our key webmaps. We use VertiGIS Studio Item Manager to access the Item Content and back the JSON up into a local file. If something goes horribly wrong, it is nice to be able to revert that webmap back to the state it was in.

I'm not sure we can declare this a 'best practice' but we decided to take the time to modify the layer IDs inside the webmap JSON. This has made reading the JSON much easier when we need to tweak it, re-publish, etc. e.g. "id": "Victoria_Buildings_4805"
On those rare occasions when the IDs change on re-publishing, we find the new IDs and then change them back to these more comprehensible layer IDs (which also keeps the connection to any VSW configuration that was previously configured for that layer).

Finally, make sure you are familiar with the tools provided by ArcGIS Pro for keeping change to a minimum when re-publishing data. In particular, Esri now gives you pretty good control over the layer number when publishing.

Others may have their own tips, but sharing knowledge is one of the cornerstones of a good community so we thought we'd share our practices with you.