What’s New in ArcGIS Enterprise 10.9: Publishing large cache contents

With the release of ArcGIS Enterprise 10.8.1, we shared an alternative workflow for publishing the contents of large scene layer packages.  You can do this by simply extracting the contents of your package to a folder or a cloud data store and publishing a scene layer that references it using the ArcGIS API for Python. ArcGIS Enterprise will serve content directly from the registered data store. This workflow is faster and far more efficient for larger data, as it does not require allocation of additional disk resources in ArcGIS Enterprise.

What’s new

At ArcGIS Enterprise 10.9, we have taken a step further by improving and extending this workflow for tile content stored in map, elevation, and vector tile packages.

It’s a simple three-step process:

1. Create ready-to-serve content.
2. Register the location where the cache content resides as a user managed data store with ArcGIS Enterprise.
3. Publish a map, vector, elevation, or scene layer that references the ready to serve content.

Step1: Create ready-to-serve content

ArcGIS Pro 2.8 provides an enhanced Extract Package geoprocessing tool to extract the contents of packages (slpk, vtpk, or tpkx) to one of the following:

• A file system: choose the “output Folder” parameter in the tool and navigate to the desired location.
• An object store in the cloud: choose the “Target Cloud connection” parameter and browse to a folder in the cloud using a Cloud storage connection file (.acs). You can build this file using the Create Cloud Storage Connection File geoprocessing tool.

You can even write your own:

• Tile cache using the open tile package specification. Read more about it in the following blog.
• Scene cache with the desired storage format, using the version 1.7 i3s specification available in GitHub.

Step2: Register a user managed data store

Ensure you have the following privileges assigned to your role in ArcGIS Enterprise:

• Register data stores
• Create, update and delete content
• Publish server-based layers

The built-in Publisher role includes these privileges.

1. Add the location where the cache layer content resides as a data store item in the ArcGIS Enterprise portal.
2. Register the folder or cloud data store to the desired federated ArcGIS site. Under the help topic Add items > Add data store you will find steps for this workflow.

Step 3: Publish layers that references the ready to serve content

Use the sample script listed below to publish a scene/elevation/vector/tile layer using the cache content located in the data store managed by you.

The publish help topic on the ArcGIS Developer site lists sample service configurations for scene, vector, tile, and elevation layers.

To accomplish step2 using the ArcGIS API for Python, see the following blog post for sample script.