An ArcGIS Server web service represents a GIS resource—such as a map, locator, or image—that is located on an ArcGIS Server site and is made available to client apps.
Work with ArcGIS Server web services
You don't need any specialized GIS software to work with a web service; you can consume the service in a web browser or custom app. However, ArcGIS applications, such as ArcMap, ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Online, and ArcGIS Enterprise portals, can also act as clients to web services, and you can write your own apps to consume web services.
Publishing a GIS resource as a service is the key to making that resource available to other people. When you deploy ArcGIS Server, you create resources in ArcGIS Desktop and publish the resources as services so that client apps can use them.
To work with ArcGIS Server web services in your Enterprise portal, you can do any of the following:
- Add a web service to Map Viewer.
- Add a web service running on a stand-alone ArcGIS Server site as a layer item.
- Publish your resource to an ArcGIS Server site that is federated with your portal. When you do this, the service is automatically added as a layer item in your portal.
When you add web services as items to your portal or publish them to a federated server, you can share them with your portal organization or specific groups in your portal. This allows portal members to use these layers in their own maps, apps, and scenes or consume them in desktop client apps.
Share secure services
When you add a secure ArcGIS Server service as an item in an ArcGIS Enterprise portal, you choose whether or not to store the credentials necessary to access the service with the layer item. If the credentials are not stored, the portal will prompt you for credentials every time you access the service. If the credentials are stored with the layer item, you won't be prompted. If you want to change credentials after adding the item, you can edit the item details and enter a different user name or password. Storing credentials with the item is only supported for token-based services.
User names might be case sensitive depending on how your identity systems are managed.
Note:
When you store your credentials for a secure service, the layer item behaves like a proxy in that all requests to the service go through ArcGIS Enterprise. This proxy adds some delay when accessing the service and is slower than going directly to the service.
Limit usage of your shared service item
If you want to share your secure service item with the public, for example, as part of a public web app, store the credentials with the item so the public is not required to log in to get to your app. You may also want to limit usage to control how many times and by whom the service is accessed. You can specify the rate limit, and to further restrict usage, designate the specific referrer URLs or IPs that can access your service, for example, the URL of your portal.
To limit usage, follow these steps:
- Add your secure service as an item to the My Content tab of the content page.
- When adding your item, choose Store credentials with service item in the Add Item pop-up.
- On the item page, click the Settings tab and scroll down to the Limit Usage section. Click Limit Usage.
- Check Enable rate limiting and set up the limits—a maximum number of requests allowed for a specific period of time or the referrer URLs and IPs that can access your service, for example, the URL to your portal. You can also limit both the rate and the referrer.
Your referrer URLs and IPs can be fully qualified URLs, wildcards to include all subdomains (http://*.domain.com), or the IP address (http://10.4.3.4). You need to specify ports and add both http and https if you want to allow access to both. For sharing services in apps hosted in your portal, you can provide either the URL to your app, or if you plan to have multiple apps that use the service, specify the URL to the portal's app directory instead (for example, http://webadaptorhost.domain.com/apps).
- Click OK.
- Share the item with others intended to have access to it: everyone (public), your organization, or specific groups you belong to.
Layers and services in your organization
You can add the following ArcGIS Server web services to your organization as layer items in My Content. Share the items to make them easier for your portal members to find and use in client apps.
- Feature services (map services with feature access enabled)
- WFS services
- Locator (geocoding) services
- Geodatabase services
- Geometry services
- Geoprocessing services
- Image services
- Map services (including map services with WMS enabled)
- Network analysis services
You can add certain ArcGIS Server web services to Map Viewer. Because they can be used in maps, these services are classified as layers in your portal. The following table shows ArcGIS Enterprise layer types and their corresponding ArcGIS Server web service types. For an explanation of each layer type, see the sections below the table.
| ArcGIS Enterprise layer | ArcGIS Server web service |
|---|---|
Feature layer | Feature service (map service with feature access enabled) Stream service |
Imagery layer | Image service (cached and dynamic) |
Elevation layer | Image service (cached, type LERC) |
Map image layer | Map service |
Scene layer | Scene service Note:Scene services cannot be published directly to ArcGIS Server; they are hosted layers only. |
WFS layer | WFS service (map service with WFS enabled) |
WMTS layer | WMTS service (map service with WMTS enabled) |
Feature layers
A feature layer is a collection of geographic features. Each feature in the collection has a location, set of properties, map symbology, and pop-up. Feature layers allow you to execute queries on the features and perform live edits on the features using templates for an enhanced editing experience. A feature layer can be managed as a part of your content or referenced in a map or app. The contents of some feature layers can be downloaded.
Streaming features
If you have ArcGIS GeoEvent Server, you can create stream services from ArcGIS GeoEvent Manager. Stream services allow you to connect to data sensors to display real-time, streaming data in your GIS clients.
You can add stream services to your portal content as feature layers and use these real-time data feeds as layers in maps or apps. A feature layer created from an ArcGIS Server stream service makes a persistent connection to the service, and data updates are pushed to the layer as they occur. They are useful for visualizing real-time data feeds that have high volumes of data or that have data that changes at unknown intervals. For example, weather warnings can be issued or updated at any time, and seeing new ones or updates as quickly as possible is important.
Streaming feature layers connect to an ArcGIS Server stream service using HTML5 WebSockets. WebSockets are a new feature of HTML5. Most modern browsers support WebSockets. To get more information about WebSockets and to test if a browser supports WebSockets, visit WebSocket.org.
Map image, elevation, and imagery layers
Map image, imagery, and elevation layers are prerendered collections of map cartography organized by location and scale. Imagery and map image layers can be displayed dynamically or as cached image tiles. Elevation layers use cached services.
Dynamic layers generate images when requested by the client viewing the layer. As you browse the map, new map images are generated and displayed. Dynamic map layers include map services and image services. Map services are based on vector data, which are typically a combination of points, lines, and polygons of geographic features. One common use of a map service is to show business data on top of a basemap tileset. Image services are based on raster data, which is essentially a grid of cells. Rasters are commonly used to store imagery and other information captured by satellite sensors.
Cached layers are organized collections of image tiles for specific geographic extents, projections, and levels of detail that are pregenerated on a server. Cached map layers include map services and image services. Cached layers support fast visualization of complex maps, since the server distributes the images whenever someone asks for a map. These map layers are created and stored on the server after you upload your data. They are appropriate for basemaps that give your maps geographic context.
When you publish a hosted imagery layer, an item is created in your portal and the underlying image service runs on the Raster Analysis Server federated with the portal.
Scene layers
Scene layers allow you to display 3D data. When you publish 3D data from ArcGIS Pro, it creates a hosted feature layer and hosted scene layer on your portal. The hosting server of the portal you publish to must be configured with ArcGIS Data Store relational and tile cache data stores. The cache for the scene layer is stored in the tile cache data store and the data for the hosted feature layer is stored in the relational data store. These two layers are related; if you delete the scene layer, the hosted feature layer is also deleted.
Beginning with ArcGIS Pro 2.1, a hosted scene layer is still created when you publish 3D data, but you have the option to leave the feature data in your data source rather than create a hosted feature layer, which copies the data to the relational data store. When you create a feature layer that references your registered data, this can help improve publishing performance. However, the two layers are no longer as closely related; when you delete the scene layer, the feature layer is not deleted.