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Layers published to your portal's federated servers

You can publish a map from ArcGIS Pro to one of your portal's federated servers, including the hosting server. If the map contains vector data from your federated server's registered folders or databases, you can publish a map image layer. This creates a map service on the federated server and a map image item on your portal. You can also publish raster data in your ArcGIS Pro project to one of your portal's federated servers (including the hosting server) as an imagery layer. This creates an image service on the federated server and an imagery layer item on your portal.

If you choose to share a WMS or Feature layer with the map image layer when you publish from ArcGIS Pro, the map service on your federated server will have Feature Access and WMS capabilities configured, respectively, and a feature layer and WMS items will be created on your portal.

If you choose to share a WMS layer with the imagery layer when you publish from ArcGIS Pro, the image service on your federated server will have the WMS capability configured, and a WMS item will be created on your portal. You can use any of these layers in maps and applications you create on your portal. You can also choose to enable WCS when you publish from ArcGIS Pro, and the image service on your federated server will have the WCS capability configured; however, there is no corresponding WCS item in Portal for ArcGIS.

Tip:

For more information on the relationship between services and portal layers, see ArcGIS Server web services.

For instructions on publishing from ArcGIS Pro, see Share a web layer in the ArcGIS Pro help.

To publish a map image layer or imagery layer that references your source data, you must register the folder, database, workgroup geodatabase, or enterprise geodatabase that contains the data with the federated server to which you publish. If you do not register the folder, database, or geodatabase, the data used in the map will be copied from your source to a file geodatabase on the federated server. See About registering your data with ArcGIS Server in the ArcGIS for Server help for information on registering folders and databases.

Item and service dependencies

When you publish a map image or imagery layer and any of their dependent layers (feature or WMS), the map or image service is created in the root folder of your federated server, and it uses data in your registered data store. This is different than when you publish a tile layer, feature layer, or scene layer from ArcGIS Pro. Publishing any of these results in a hosted web layer, the data is always copied to the hosting server, and the service is created in the Hosted folder on your hosting server. In the case of these hosted web layers, you can delete the items from your portal if you no longer need them, and this deletes the services and data from the hosting server.

If you no longer need a map image layer, imagery layer, WMS item, or feature layer, you can also delete the item from your portal. However, this does not delete the service from the federated server, nor does it delete the data from your registered data store. This allows you to continue using the services and your data. If you want to re-create the portal items, you can sign in to your portal and add the item from the web. Be aware, though, that you must reset sharing on the item when you re-add it to the portal.

Also be aware that since the service still exists, you cannot republish the same map image, imagery, WMS, or feature layer from ArcGIS Pro unless you delete the service from the federated server using ArcGIS Server Manager. When you delete the map or image service from the federated server, the associated map image layer or imagery layer is deleted from the portal. If you had feature access or WMS enabled on the map service, those items are also deleted from your portal. If you had WMS enabled on the image service, the WMS item is also deleted from the portal.

For more information on item and service dependencies, see Relationships between web services and portal items in the ArcGIS for Server help.