Allow user to create and share a solution clone (app/maps/layers) within and between organizations

JeffShaw

I need this for allowing members of the same and other organizations to replicate "best practice" applications and dependent maps and layers, so they can implement them for their own use.

This would also support creating offline backups, and for creating entirely new versions of an app along with any dependent webmaps. 

This is possible currently in Portal by exporting all items in a group to an "export package (.epk), as described in Export and import group content.

In AGOL, it would need to preserve the item ids upon import, or if not possible, then use the clone_items API function to automatically update dependencies. Essentially it would allow the use of an interchange file during the normal clone process, which AGOL fully supports. Esri does something similar for their own "Solutions". Without using such a file you need to sign in as admin in both orgs in order to use the clone workflow. 

ArcGIS Assistant can move content between orgs but it doesn't handle the dependencies.

 

JeffShaw

Thank you @SimonSchütte_ct!  I hadn't seen that. The Solution Template approach would be great, but requires deploying a custom JavaScript app to a web server, and that's not an option for the organization I am developing this for. It needs to be hosted in ArcGIS Online.

In the 2020 presentation you reference, @ChrisFox  indicated that Esri might create hosted apps for building and deploying custom "solution templates". It seems that hasn't happened yet though.

I like the "Solutions" approach, and we had expressed interest to someone at Esri about adding the solutions I am working on to the suite of Esri solutions, but haven't gotten any traction on that.

So for now I think I'll need to solve this by publishing ArcGIS Online notebooks as Web Tools, with the notebooks using item cloning functions. From the testing I have done, it appears that it should work, and it offers some of the same capability for allowing organizations to have the replicated maps and apps use their own layer items.

Unfortunately though, Web Tools can't be shared as Public. In our case that's okay for now since most of the 70+ organizations that would want to replicate these solutions belong to our ArcGIS Hub. But it will limit which individuals in those organizations can run the cloning tools.