Expose ArcGIS Online/Portal Atttachments thru FeatureReader

Yes please!

Having the ability to use the featurereader to read attachments is desperately needed. Additionally it would be helpful if the featurereader supported a where clause when attempting to read ArcGIS Online or Portal layers. What would be super helpful is if when reading the attachments, you could opt to not read the physical attachments. This applies to both AGOL and Portal readers.

Currently I have not been able to read the attachment attributes without also reading the attachment. When we have thousands of records, each with multiple attachments, we now have to read every record and all its attachments in before we can check to see if updates are needed. We want to read only the name, size, etc., and determine only the global IDs that that have rows changed in their attachment table to then use a featurereader with a where clause filtered to read only those records that have attachments that are not currently in our base dataset (or alternatively exist in our base dataset and no longer exist in the hosted feature service layer). This would dramatically increase productivity if this were possible as simply reading in the features currently takes up to an hour on some of our processes.

This would be really useful compared to a true reader! I am trying to use an attribute for the Feature Service parameter so that the feature reader wont need to be edited everytime the feature service wants to be changed.

Also saw a similar idea here: AC Idea: Include the option "Include Attachments" in the Feature Reader for AGOL (safe.com)

For anyone who is interested, I created a sample workspace for reading the attachment metadata with the httpCaller and parsing the JSON and then getting just the attachments I want. I also really like the idea of @neilmyoung​  to have an option just to read the metadata in the Reader/Feature Reader at first, as well. And then could have a reader option to just get the attachments via their url.

The Reader has an option to “Include Attachments”. Why not the Feature Reader?

According to this article, writing attachments is coming in 2024 via a packaged transformer?https://community.safe.com/data-7/how-to-write-attachments-to-arcgis-online-19577 

this link appears broken 🤕

I found that it was very slow and prone to break to read attachments + features in a reader, I switched to a feature reader and using httpcallers to get the attachment metadata + download attachments that have been changed, which has worked much smoother and faster.