Hi all,
I am trying to work out the best way to do quite a trivial GIS task for users who don't use desktop GIS. Mainly I want to allow people to export a dataset to shapefile format, or csv, xls etc.
For a bit of context, we store our spatial data in a SQL database. Desktop GIS users make an ODBC connection to the data, and we also publish as web services for our web GIS users. Often we publish as Map Image layers as most users only need to view the data and not edit, but this does limit some of the functionality within Enterprise for extracting data. The majority of our users view data within Enterprise, and sometimes they want to export the dataset out as a shapefile or in table format. This is very simple to do in desktop GIS, but requests are becoming more frequent.
I have some script files setup to convert some of the frequently requested data, which is fine for myself to run, but ideally I want to allow people who aren't desktop GIS users, to self serve and select whatever data they want to convert.
I am trying to work out the best way to do this. I know I can run a geoprocessing tool, such as feature class to feature class, and share it as a webtool to Enterprise, and that would work for a specific dataset, but I was wondering if there is a better way to do this, and ideally let the user select what dataset they want to convert/extract?