Sites is designed to work with the content and services within your ArcGIS Enterprise deployment and will allow you to make this content accessible through sites and pages created with ArcGIS Enterprise sites. Types of content and services you can use with Sites include: hosted layers within the Enterprise portal, services from the servers you have federated with ArcGIS Enterprise, and services that have been registered as items with the portal.
Note:
Sites only supports services on ArcGIS Server 10.1 or higher.
Below are some best practices for organizing and managing your services and data to best work with Sites.
Service properties
Max record count should be less than 5,000
When publishing a service, a default max record count of 1,000 or 2,000 is set and intended to provide optimal performance from your server to the client. The max record count determines the maximum number of features that can be returned in a single request. When a service has this set too high, a client can try to request all the data in a single request that is slow to generate and too large to send across the Internet.
It may make sense to increase the value over the default range if you have just over 2,000 or around 4,000 features total in your layer or table.
It’s important to note that no matter the max record count, Sites will query out all the data 1,000 records at a time and aggregate it to support file downloads into CSV, KML, SHP, or GeoJSON.
OGC links
WMS, WFS, and WCS links are added to the API section of the item view on each site when a service publisher has enabled them on the specific service. If the publisher did not enable these capabilities at the time of publishing, they can edit the service and turn them on. Please note that OGC links will only appear on services from ArcGIS Server 10.2 or higher.
Feature Access is not necessary
Sites queries features out of the Map Service the same way it queries features from a Feature Service. Unless you have another need to have Feature Access enabled, it is best to leave it off.
Scale dependencies do not matter
Sites works by sending requests to your Map or Feature Services and querying out the data regardless of the extent. While cartographically thinking you may not want to show address points at a global scale, Sites will query out all the data and provide high-level visualizations of the data by showing a summary of locations or a gridded visualization that can be filtered and shows the density of features. These visualizations are not customizable.
Download support on Sites
Download functionality is enabled on any uploaded file (image, PDF, and more) and on any hosted layer that supports the extract capability. If you share an item from a service that does not support extract then download is disabled with a tool tip.
Organizing services
Large services will time out
Organizing your data in multiple services will be faster than having all data in one service. For the best performance from Sites it is recommended to have no more than 20 layers per service.
Managing the data
The following best practices will help your data display in a consistent and user-friendly format within Sites.
Use field aliases or have user friendly field names
Turn off unimportant fields
Topologies are not supported in Sites
Coded value domains are supported
Contrary to the previous section, there is one behavior of the geodatabase that is supported when generating the open-machine-readable formats. Coded Value Domains will be honored when viewing data in Sites, and when the data is downloaded, the raw values will be replaced by the coded value.
Data must support statistics
When publishing data to ArcGIS Server 10.03 or later, a large majority of datasets will natively support statistics. This allows the application to provide a summary of the data to the consumer so they get a quick view of the values being stored in the data.
In efforts to be efficient to the consumer as well as light on the queries to your server, the applicaiton will only build statistics for the first 20 columns in a dataset.
It is recommended that you enable editor tracking so that you can ensure that users are always receiving the most up-to-date data
Item configuration
When configuring items to be used with Sites keep the following best pracetices in mind.
Item title is the dataset name
Sites uses the Terms of Use field as the data license
There is a section on every item in the Enterprise portal to provide information on Terms of Use. Sites will interpret this field as the License for the data. Applying a license for your data can be important for data consumers to know how they can work with the data and who to credit for usage.
Many providers use links to existing data policies they use, while others generate a Creative Commons license. Using the Creative Commons License Picker, you can enable this section of the item details to input HTML, and you can input the code generated by the license picker.
Search for data is based on item extent