Protocolbuffer Binary Format (PBF) Documentation or Examples?

[TomNeer]

ArcGIS Enterprise added support for the PBF output format in 10.7.1. We are having difficulty finding any documentation or examples on Esri's implementation of PBF in either the Developer's documentation or Esri's Github outside of Vector Tiles. We would like to look at using this format with some larger datasets. Any pointers would be appreciated? 

[mgeorge]

Sorry Darren Breen‌, we are still planning to document the spec, but we want to at least have a ready built parser for folks to use that we can share. We need to do a little bit of refactoring to pull this out of the API. 

[DarellStoick]

Any update on this?  Our organization is also looking for the pbf specs for ESRI's version.

[TomNeer]

Haven't heard anything. 

[mgeorge]

Hi all, 

Sorry for the lack of information on this, things are a bit hectic with UC. I'll follow-up internally. 

Matt

[TomNeer]

It is my understanding that Esri has adopted the Mapbox Vector Tile Specification. Not sure which version, assuming 2.0 or earlier). Hopefully, Esri can confirm. PBF specification is at Specification | Vector tiles | Mapbox 

[mgeorge]

Hi Tom, 

For Vector Tiles, we do indeed use the Mapbox Vector Tile spec. The f=pbf format of FeatureServices however is an esri Feature Tile serialization spec. Feature Tiles are more for dynamic visualizations, whereas Vector Tiles are better for things like basemaps. 

The documentation on this has been held up, but I think more details should be forthcoming. I'll check in again. 

We've also worked to improve the performance of pbf encoded Feature Tiles in our upcoming 4.17 release. Whereas before we were doing some quite a bit of conversion to deserialize features, we've reworked things so that we can work directly against the compressed binary data. 

Matt

[KirkDybvik]

I too would be interested in understanding the format/spec of the pbf of FeatureServices.  Any examples of deserializing the features returned as pbf would be great.  We are downloading data from the National Interagency Fire Center, and downloading a large payload in geojson is brutally slow.  The pbf downloads super fast, but I have no good way to read it programmatically.

Kirk

[SolidData]

Just a friendly bump, checking for an update on the FeatureService info.  Would really like to replace json with pbf for feature download etc.  Meaning, pbf to feature set or something similar.  Any updates on this front?

[Cees]

Hello, is there already a description how we can deserialize the pbf format for feature services?

[mgeorge]

Hi all,

The FeatureCollection PBF spec can now be found here: https://github.com/Esri/arcgis-pbf

Matt