About data packaging

Data packaging, a tool provided by Mobile Project Center, allows you to create mobile caches from mobile services and/or hosted feature services, so that the caches can be included into your project before provisioning into field devices.

Data packaging is mandatory of projects containing hosted feature services, and is recommended for projects with mobile services for the following reasons:

• Deploying a project with mobile caches facilitates the field work, because the packaged data (including attachment data, if applicable) is readily available when field workers open the project in field applications. Field workers don't need to download data while they're in the field, where most likely, they're connected with limited bandwidth. This is especially important when the data contains large or lots of attachments. In this regard, data packaging makes the field work more efficient.
• If field workers cannot connect in the field, data packaging is the only option to provision mobile map data from mobile services and feature services.
• By using data packaging with your defined project extent, you can reuse the same project for field workers who work in different areas. For example, in a firefighting project, you might want your field workers to collect data about land features and synchronize the data back to the database in real-time for decision making. To ensure high efficiency, the inspection area of each worker should not overlap. For this reason, when you create mobile projects for your field workers, set a specific extent as the project extent for a worker, package the data for that extent, save the project, then save the project as a new one for another worker by defining a different project extent and packaging data for that extent.

Note:

Data packaging in Mobile Project Center is different from using the Create Mobile Cache tool provided by ArcGIS for Desktop:

• Data packaging is a feature in Mobile Project Center that allows you to get data from mobile services and/or feature services, and include the data in your project. You need an ArcGIS Server to host mobile services and ArcGIS Online for organizations or Portal for ArcGIS to host feature services (see the Server workflow for details).
• The Create Mobile Cache tool allows you to build a mobile cache directly from an ArcMap document, where you can then add a copy of the mobile cache to your mobile project in Mobile Project Center as an offline data source. In this case, real-time synchronization with the back-end database is not supported (see the Desktop workflow for details).