Thought this made more sense as a stand-alone post.
Basic Question:
With ArcGIS Explorer 1500, is it possible to extract data from an ArcGIS Server 9.3.1 service? By "extract data", I mean can an AGX 1500 user export data from an AGS 9.3.1 service out to a shapefile or geodatabase? What are the options? And can we expect to see additional data extract options for the next release of AGX? Our users would benefit significantly by an ability to "clip" data from a map service and save it to local disk for other purposes.
Futher Detail and Follow-on Questions
When choosing Share > Layer Package, there is a grayed-out option labeled "Include ArcSDE geodatabase data". Is this option only enabled when an AGX 1500 user, with the Data Expansion Pack installed, has Direct Connect SDE layers opened? If that's the case, we can ignore this as an extract option because we don't presently allow users to make SDE connections via AGX 1500. Data access should be indirect for our publishing system, e.g. via AGS services only.
The only method I know to save data from a map service is to perform a query with the new AGX 1500 Query tool. This creates a Query Layer. When the map document is saved, the *.nmf file then appears to contain the features from the Query Layer. Not sure if it's both geometry and attributes. But this doesn't satisfy what I'm after.
ArcGIS Desktop allows data to be saved off to a personal or file geodatabase, if and only if (evidently) an ArcSDE-based geodata service with the same name as a map service is manually created. Once that pair is available, a user can enable the Distributed Geodatabase toolbar and click the Extract Data icon. Is the same, or similar, functionality available in AGX 1500?
A geodata service in isolation (out of the box) seems useless in both ArcGIS Desktop and ArcGIS Explorer 1500; e.g. once created, you don't seem able to add a geodata service directly. Perhaps these are only accessible via an API. To repeat, the only way I was to accomplish any proper data extraction at all in ArcGIS Desktop was to create two services--one map service and one geodatabase service--with the same name, add the map service to ArcMap, and click the Extract Data icon on the Distributed Geodatabase toolbar. I hope Esri will improve the AGS doc set on creating and using geodata services in an out-of-the-box fashion.
I've heard one can use a Feature Service to extract data; but Feature Services (are they not?) are only available at ArcGIS Server 10. Can AGX 1500 presently consume Feature Services *and* use them to extract data? Or is this an ability only ArcMap 10 has?
