Publishing a hosted feature service in Portal for ArcGIS using a shapefile or CSV file

You can log in to the portal website and publish a service that contains features from shapefiles (packaged in a .zip file) or comma-separated value (CSV) files that you have stored on your computer. The resultant service is published to your portal's hosting server.

The zipped shapefiles must contain .shp, .shx, .dbf, and .prj files. If there are multiple shapefiles in the .zip file, they will all be included in the feature service.

CSV files must contain either address information or latitude-longitude coordinates in decimal degrees. CSV files must be formatted and saved as .csv. Other text-based file types cannot be published.

Your login must be in the Publisher or Administrator role to publish a feature service.

The feature service gets published in the WGS 1984 Web Mercator (Auxiliary Sphere) coordinate system. Uploads over 5 GB in size are not supported and will result in an error.

Follow these steps to publish a feature service from a zipped shapefile or CSV file:

Steps:

1. Sign in to the website.

   If you have a large file to publish, check Keep me signed in when signing in. This helps prevent the website from timing out before the service has been created.

2. Open My Content and click the Add Item button.

   The Add Item window appears.

3. Choose On my Computer from the The item is options.
4. Click the browse button, and choose the file on your computer.

Shapefiles must be compressed as a .zip file containing .shp, .shx, .dbf, and .prj files.

CSV files need to contain address information or latitude-longitude coordinates in decimal degrees. CSV files must be formatted and saved as .csv. Other text-based file types cannot be published.

5. Type a title for the file.

   This title will also be used for the feature service.

6. Type tag terms separated by commas.

   Tags are words or short phrases that describe your item and improve its findability. Federal land is considered one tag, while Federal, land is considered two tags.

7. Check the box next to Publish this file as a feature service.

   If you leave the box unchecked, your data file is added to My Content but no feature service is created. You can publish a feature service later if you want.

8. If you are publishing a CSV file, choose to locate the features using either latitude-longitude or address.
9. If you chose to locate addresses, choose the country used to geocode your addresses from the Country drop-down list. If your file contains addresses from multiple countries or from a country not in the list, select World.
   Note:

   To publish a CSV file containing addresses, your portal must be configured to use a geocode utility service that can do batch geocoding.

10. Review the field types and location fields. You can change them if necessary.
    1. Click a Field Type cell to choose a different type.
    2. Click a Location Field cell to choose a different field.
11. Click Add Item.

It may take some time to upload the file. Once loaded, your file is published as a hosted feature service. The data file and the service are separately added to My Content. The items are independent, so for example, if you change the thumbnail in the service's item details, the thumbnail does not update on the file's item details.

By default, the feature service can only be accessed by the publisher. You can share the feature service and the file with everyone in your organization or members of specific groups.

Also be aware that, by default, only 2000 records are returned at a time when drawing or querying a feature service published from a CSV or shapefile. To change the number of records returned, you can edit the Maximum Number of Records Returned by Server property in the service's parameters in ArcGIS Server Manager.