Benefits to using map or feature service layer in Operations Dashboard

[ThomasMathew1]

Are there any benefits (performance, quality of display or any other) to having map service layers in operations dashboard vs having feature service layers?

In my case, the dashboard will be used to display live data coming in from a geoevent service updated to a feature services. The operations dashboard will be used to check for updates to the layer (map or feature, depending on what I decide to use) every 6 seconds.

Is there any difference if the layers in the operations dashboard were map or feature layers?

I'm looking for opinions but any documentation to support will also be appreciated.

Kindly share your thoughts.

[ChristopherOlsen]

Hi Thomas,

In general, there isn't too much difference in regard to map service and feature service performance within Operations Dashboard. There are a couple of key differences though, that might have an effect on how you would set it up.  For instance, map services within Dashboard do not support selection- see help section here. You can work around this by adding the MS layer as a data source at its root level for the layer. Also, layer filters are unsupported for map services.

As far as the performance, I haven't seen much of a difference between the two specifically within Dashboard, even though they draw differently in the webmap.

Thanks,
Chris

[ThomasMathew1]

Thank you for this information. Related to performance of these services, when a map service refreshes on Operations Dashboard, ArcGIS Server will generate a new image for all the features and send it to the operations view. But when a feature service refreshes, do all the features stream to operations view or only the modified and new features stream back to the operations view?

Knowing this will help understand if network capacity plays an important role when working with a large number of features and a feature service.

[MatthewRingel__myesri_]

Could you expand a little on what you mean by "You can work around this by adding the MS layer as a data source at its root level for the layer."

Are you saying that if the MS is added to the webmap at the root level, instead of at the layer level then you can use selections? Or what?

I have a dashboard where I'd like to use category selectors to filter what's on the map. I jumped through some hoops to turn my database query view into a feature service in order to do this, but if there's a way to do it with a map service then I'm interested in finding out how.