Mobile Project Center - Error: The operation has timed out

Question

Hi

I'm having some problems adding an operational map layer from an ArcGIS Server mobile service. The service is created ok in ArcGIS Server and is working correctly when viewed in ArcMap. However, when I go to Add the service in mobile project center, I get the following error message after about 30 seconds:

Error: The operation has timed out

If I look at the server logs, they suggest that server has processed the request ok (i.e. it says "Binary request successfully processed") and there are no errors in the log. I can also successfully add other services from this ArcGIS Server without issue.

So - what is causing the time out? Is there a setting to increase the time out? Why doesn't Esri software provide you with enough information in the error message to fix issues like this?

If anyone has any ideas, they'd be most appreciated. I've already wasted half a day trying to get it working. Stuff like this should be simple, so why do Esri make it so difficult?

Regards

John

JohnFannon · Answer

This specific issue was with v10 of ArcGIS MPC. What we did at v10 was produce an amp file (which was xml at v10) by adding operational layers from the mobile caches. This put all the config in the amp file, including the checksum and then all we did was edit it to add the server path and protocol.

I'm not sure if checksum is required in the amp file (a JSON file) at v10.1.1+ as when we add an operational layer from mobile cache, it no longer puts the checksum in the amp file. I've not tried it, so I don't know for sure, but you could try just specifying:

"mobileServiceUrl": "<your url>",
"webClientProtocolType": "BinaryWebService",

for the cache in the JSON.

Hope that helps.

John

JoshPritt · Answer

Also it looks like your example is from an XML file.  Our .amp file seems to be a large JSON string.  Is your .amp file an XML file?
We were able to create a mobile project with the full MXD with all the layers we wanted as long as the service we pulled the operational layers from pointed at a file geodatabase we exported from our original MXD.  
We then created another MXD with just a few layers that pointed at the SDE database.  As long as we make MXDs with just a few layers it will let us add them to the mobile project.  When we try to add operational layers to a mobile project from a service that has all the layers we need from SDE it will timeout on the first HTTPWebRequest.GetResponse().  
So then we just edited the .amp file for the full, file geodatabase service and changed the mobileServiceUrl to point to the service of the SDE service.  We had to then open that edited .amp file in Mobile Project Center, change something like the extent just to make it have something to save, then saved it as a different project name which created a new folder and .amp file, etc.
We were then able to open that mobile project in the ArcGIS Mobile application and get to the step in the synchronize task to pick which layers to sync but couldn't continue because we had to stop the ArcGIS Server services so the DBAs could have exclusive access in order to make some changes, etc.  So we'll test today to see if we can get it to sync the data down to the mobile cache then we can test that mobile cache with our custom mobile application and see if it works!

JoshPritt · Answer

Where did you get that checksum value? Was it already there for you? Or did you just make one up? Or did you get it from somewhere else?No we didn't figure it out - after working with ArcGIS for Windows Mobile for some months now, we have found it to be very buggy. Both the applications and tools crash regularly and give no useful error information. To work around this one, we generated local caches using the Create Mobile Map tool and used these to configure the mobile project and export an amp file. We then added the service URL into the amp file manually for each cache that required sync-ing. For example: Hope that helps John