Where does Enterprise store offline areas?

[ZacharyHart]

In Portal, you can create prepackaged offline areas. Where does Enterprise store these areas? I can find the 'Map Area' in /portal/sharing/rest and can also find the item in the arcgisportal/content directory in the file system, but not the offline data itself.

I'm curious to know what the file format it. TPK? MPK? I'm wondering if these areas can then be sideloaded into something like Collector.

The ability to create offline areas in Portal is by far more convenient than Desktop/Pro methods.

[JonEmch]

Hey there Zachary,

   Thank you for reaching out! I'm doing some research on this for you. I am interested in the methodology here: specifically sideloading the TPK rather than downloading the offline area directly from ArcGIS Enterprise. Could you clarify your preference here for us? 

Thanks!

[ZacharyHart]

hi @JonEmch  !

The use case/scenario involves supporting large land areas with very poor connectivity.

• Downloading offline areas via mobile app (Collector in this case [Field Maps forthcoming]) is slow and unreliable. Users often have many failed download attempts.
• The Desktop/Pro methodologies for creating offline areas have proved cumbersome.
  • To my knowledge, neither offers the ability to cache online services...only local data.
  • We've tried the TilePackageCreator with mixed results.
• Using Enterprise to create prepackaged map areas (so far) has proven simple & bullet-proof.
  • The user would still be faced with the challenge of downloading though.

So far, I'm surprised/impressed with Enterprise's ability to quickly & reliably create these areas.

Does that help?

Thanks in advance.

[JonEmch]

Hey there Zachary,

   Thank you for your patience. Me and a few of my colleagues have been working diligently on synthesizing an answer for you.

   This workflow, (specifically step 6), describes how to properly set up the device to use a sideloaded tile package for a base map. To be clear, this will pull in the basemap for the entire web map scale, not the web map area. Additionally, this excludes any feature data.

   According to our research, it is possible to use the basemap TPK generated by the offline map area creation utility, but it involves significant sleuthing around network requests in the web map to find your scope. Word of caution with this workflow: you will only be able to sideload one area per web map in collector, so if you have more than one offline areas this will not be a viable solution.

As for performance, would you be able to speak to the challenges you are facing here? Feel free to reply with any other questions.

[AndrewVentham]

I'm also curious to know the storage location in order to check the size of the packages created.
Can anyone tell us where they are stored?