Best practices for custom basemaps in Portal (State Plane data, cache updates, and basemap gallery setup)

[Frank_SA]

I’m am not really sure if we have “basemaps” set up in our organization is the best/most efficient way we have reference layers set up for our users.  I am looking for some best practices and advice around building and serving custom basemaps for my organizaton in ArcGIS Enterprise Portal.

My current setup is a published map service that includes centerlines with labeling turned on at different scale levels, a city boundary, and assessor parcels that appear at certain zoom levels. In that same service, I include a second copy of the same layers styled as hollow, which I overlay on aerial imagery.

These layers aren’t meant to be queried — they’re primarily visual reference layers for operational data to sit on top of, functioning like a basemap. However, this approach feels inefficient since all the data still loads and users can technically query it even though that’s not the intent. I’d like to make this more efficient and more aligned with Esri’s recommended basemap design workflows.

I would like to get any feed back on:

Best practices for publishing and maintaining custom basemaps — for example, whether to use cached map services, vector tile layers, or other options. If using cached map services, how are those caches typically updated when there’s a change to the city boundary or local right-of-way data?

What it means to add a basemap to the Portal basemap gallery — and what’s required to make a service available there.

How to handle projection differences when your enterprise data is maintained in State Plane, but the basemap gallery and many Esri apps (like Cityworks or Experience Builder) use Web Mercator.

I’d really appreciate any examples or guidance from others who have put together basemaps or reference data for their organizations. How do you structure your basemap layers to balance performance, appearance, and easy compatibility across applications that play well with esri?

Thanks !

[ZachBodenner]

I'll share my two cents even if they're not necessarily 'best practice.' So we have much of our Enteprise data in a county-based state plane projection - what I do is use vector tiles and I will have them in a map in Pro in that system. Then produce the vector tiles in that CS. When you share the vector tiles, they'll carry that up to the web service. Then, go into a new map and add the vector tile layer(s) to the basemap and remove whatever the default is. Once you save that map that only has vector tiles in the CS you want, then the map itself will be in that CS. So what I'll do is then save that map with a name identifying it as a basemap, share it to whatever group is the Basemap Gallery, and viola, you have a basemap in your CS. 

Now there are sometimes needs to use web mercator, so for our most-used (standard) basemap, I also publish a second set of vector tiles, only with the ArcPro map projected into web mercator.

I put together a pro Task that will build new tiles, share, and overwrite the web services used in the basemaps, so it's kind of a one-click process to update them after changes get made.

[Frank_SA]

Thanks for the insight to your workflow. I have yet to work with vector tiles so a clarification please.

In your setup, when the underlying enterprise data changes (for example, a city boundary is edited, or ROW changes), do your published vector tiles automatically reflect those edits, or do you have to rebuild/re-share the vector tiles each time?

[ZachBodenner]

You have to regenerate them. Vector Tiles are static like a map cache (though through the web tool Vector Tile Style Editor you can edit things like color, labels, etc). Creating a Vector Tile Package does not create any kind of link between the underlying data and the vector tiles themselves. 

[Frank_SA]

Thanks, I will still look into it, city boundaries and most of the features I am using do not change often