Enabling a hosted feature service for offline mapping

You can enable a sync capability on hosted feature services you published to your portal that will allow your clients to work with a local copy of the data even when they are offline. Clients can then synchronize the data with the feature service when they are online. If you enable the sync capability from ArcMap when you publish to your portal, the data is automatically configured to allow synchronization to occur. However, if you decide to enable the sync capability after publishing from ArcMap, or you publish a hosted feature service from a shapefile or CSV file in your portal, you must prepare the data to participate in synchronization.

NoteNote:

ArcGIS clients and developer SDKs will progressively add support for the sync capability in feature services. The first clients to support working with maps while offline are the 10.2.1 versions of Collector for ArcGIS and ArcGIS Runtime SDKs. Both are expected to ship in early 2014.

The following sections describe how to add a Global ID to the feature class in your portal's managed database, enable the feature class for archiving, and enable the sync capability on an existing service.

Alter the data in the managed database

When you publish a shapefile or CSV as a feature service in Portal for ArcGIS, a feature class is created in the managed database of your hosted ArcGIS Server. Similarly, when you publish a hosted feature service to your portal from ArcMap, all the feature layers are copied to the managed database. To enable the sync capability, Global IDs must be added to the feature classes in the managed database, and the feature classes must be enabled for archiving. This can only be done by the owner of the feature class. If you do not know the user name and password used for the hosted server's managed database, contact your portal administrator to prepare the data for you.

Steps:
  1. Determine what feature classes are in the hosted feature service for which you want to enable the sync capability.
    1. Start ArcCatalog and connect to your hosted server. You must make a publisher or administrator connection.
    2. Open the Hosted folder.
    3. Right-click your hosted feature service and click Service Workspaces.
    4. Click the Copied tab.

      The name of the feature class (or classes) that participate in your hosted feature service are listed here. Take note of the feature class names, as these are the feature classes you need to modify to enable sync capabilities.

  2. In ArcCatalog, connect to the enterprise geodatabase that has been registered as your hosted server's managed database. Be sure to connect as the same user that was used when the geodatabase was registered with ArcGIS Server.
  3. Right-click the first feature class, point to Manage, and click Add Global IDs.
  4. Once Global IDs have been added, right-click the same feature class, point to Manage, and click Enable Archiving.
  5. Repeat the previous two steps for every feature class that participates in your hosted feature service.

Now you can enable the sync capability on the hosted feature service.

Enable the sync capability

Once the data is prepared, the owner of the hosted feature service can enable the sync capability to allow clients to download data from and synchronize data with the feature service.

Enable the sync capability from the item details page for the hosted feature service.

Steps:
  1. Sign in to your portal as the owner of the hosted feature service.
  2. Open the item details for the service (Features).
  3. Click Edit and scroll down to the Properties section of the page.
  4. Check the box next to Enable Sync (disconnected editing with synchronization).
  5. If you want to allow clients to edit the data they will download, check the box next to Enable editing and allow editors to, and choose what type of edits you want to allow.
    • Add, update, and delete features gives editors the most privileges of the three choices. Editors can add new features, move existing features, change existing attribute values, and delete existing features.
    • Update feature attributes only is useful when you want editors to enter attribute information for existing features 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 editors to report geographic information to you, but not delete or update existing features. For example, if you have an application that allows citizens to report graffiti so you can send a crew to investigate and remove it, you would want the citizens to add new locations but not remove or alter existing locations.
  6. Click Save to apply your changes.
3/24/2014