Normally, the data we publish comes from SDE. However, we are trying to automate the AGOL update and let another department handle it.
Our first AGOL publishing was done by uploading a shp/gdb (zip). However, because all our data is in SDE, it made not sense to continue that way and now we have MXD-s we use for publishing.
After some reading on this Python automation , I realized we are approaching this the wrong way: updating/overwriting the feat. layer by uploading a zip is a better option. The fact that the data used for this automation is not coming from SDE ( it is created by a model and exported to SHP/GDB) goes along with the zip-based update method ...
While we'll have to read the documentation, having a sample script would help.... Found the ESRI samples, but as always , they use the most simplistic example ( csv) and it is not as helpful as they thought it would be. 🙂
Thanks!