ArcGIS Enterprise

How to publish a web tool from ArcGIS Pro

The first time you publish a web tool from ArcGIS Pro can be a little challenging. This blog will walk you through the whole process. Alternatively, you can view a quick tour of authoring and sharing web tools in our documentation

Throughout this blog, I’ll use a simplified wind farm analysis as an example. This sample, including data, and steps to create the model, are available in this link.

Preparing your analysis

The original site suitability study of proposed wind farm has a long workflow. To make it easier to follow, I have eliminated a few steps at the end of that study for simplicity.

In addition, there are a few improvements to speed up the analysis. These include removing some of the copy features steps in the original model, using a simplified data source, and writing intermediate data to in_memory workspace. Although you can run the web tool published with the original model, we recommend these optimization steps. This can improve the efficiency when you’re running the web tool.

Once the preparation is done, run the analysis. After that, there will be a history item. This history item will be used for the next step.

Take a look at the video below. It shows how you can prepare your analysis mentioned above.

Our goal is to let you publish as many analyses as possible. However, not all data types are supported in web tools. I strongly suggest you to check the supported data types.

Optionally, you can add metadata of the tool. If you don’t add them while preparing your tool, you will have to provide them during publishing, as an additional step later on.

Publish your analysis as a web tool from a history item

You can find the result of your analysis in the history pane as a history item. From there, you can follow these steps below, to publish your analysis as a web tool.

First, you need to know the name, location, and sharing settings of your web tool. You can set all of them in the General tab of the Share as a web tool pane. Also in the General tab, if the data used in the model is small, copy your data to the server is a good option. If it’s very large, use referenced data instead.

Second, if you have some settings about tool, like the execution mode, and maximum number of records return, you can set them in the Configuration tab.

At last, also the most important, is to set  the metadata, and the input mode of each parameter of each tool you want to publish.

You can view all the information above at publish web tools in ArcGIS Pro, or take a look at the YouTube video below.

As you can see from the video, different input modes have a major impact on your published web tool. As a result, the way you provide input to your web tool, can be different than the way you provide input to your original tool. I strongly encourage you to check out the documentation about input mode.

Conclusion

After following the steps above, you should have your web tools published, and you are ready to consume the web tool. There will be more blogs showing different ways to consume a web tool. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, check our documentation, or other videos at our YouTube playlist.

About the authors

Simon is a product engineer on the geoprocessing services team since 2018. He works with different teams to improve the user experience of publishing and consuming geoprocessing services. Each year at the Esri User Conference and Developer Summit, he presents and supports users on topics related to geoprocessing services. Simon is also an opera lover and a world traveler.

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