I'm trying to get my head around offline map packages and how we can best use them within our organisation (a UK water utility). We have a nice VTPK for our whole area which is around 1gb in size and gets updated a couple of times a year. At the moment we don't have a slick process for sideloading this VTPK onto devices so I'm just looking at the standard process of creating offline map packages certain editing maps.
In my example map we have our VTPK along with a set of read-only boundaries which might get updated once a month. I then have two editable features services (one hosted in Portal 10.8.1 and one published from ArcGIS Server 10.8.1).
I've created a test offline area with min level of detail 1:6,000,000 and max level of detail 1:400. Total package size is 115mb which is broken down as follows:
- VTPK - 113mb
- Read only boundaries - 1.4mb
- Editable layer 1 - 344k
- Editable layer 2 - 684k
I have not scheduled any automatic updates for this area but I can see the option to manually refresh either the whole package or the individual components. So my questions are:
- If I set the map area to update automatically at say 11pm each day would this recreate all components of the map package including the VTPK and the boundaries, even though on most occasions they won't have changed? Or is it clever enough to detect the layers that have changed and only update those?
- If I choose not to do any automatic updates via this mechanism is there the option to use the ArcGIS API for Python or similar to script scheduled updates to only the two editable layers? Or would I have to do that process myself manually?
