Latest Contributions by MattCooper

You don't have to federate with AGS to get Portal security to work with Azure AD.  We did add in a federated AGS Server, but the configuration for SAML as the identity provider is a separate part of Portal setup than the area where you configure a server you wish to federate with. As for if it would be better to mix (I'm assuming you mean federating AGS with Portal here) that would be up to you.  If you don't want Portal to "control" the AGS server, then don't federate it.  However, you would be missing out on some functionality of Portal that is only available with a federated server.  See About using your portal with ArcGIS Server—Portal for ArcGIS (10.4.1) | ArcGIS Enterprise for a list of features that require a federated server.  If none of that is important to you, then it would probably be just fine to keep them separate. At 10.5 you might have other considerations now that the named user model has changed.  I don't know what it would mean if you kept AGS and Portal separate (or even if you could).  I have setup 10.5 Portal and AGS, but have only done it using a federated AGS with Azure AD.   ... View more

We've done it a couple ways now.  First was configuring Azure AD and using Azure AD Domain Services to network all our Azure VM's.  Once you have Azure VM's configured with Azure AD Domain services then hooking up AGS Manager security configuration (Integrated Windows, LDAP, etc) to them is no different than on-premise.  The configuration in Azure portal can be a bit confusing since some settings are only available on the old azure portal (https://manage.windowsazure.com/ vs https://portal.azure.com), so you sometimes need to jump between the two and that is really confusing if you don't know the old portal exists. We've also recently configured Portal/ArcGIS Server with Azure AD using SAML.  For this you need to configure an application in your Azure AD account.  Once you create the app, you will use the URL and ID's that Azure provides to do your setup in Portal.  Unfortunately if you need to modify the SAML token attributes that Azure AD emits the only way that I have found to do this is to upgrade to Azure AD Premium service.  Esri has provided a custom app configuration template in the Azure Marketplace for free, but it only works for ArcGIS Online, not Portal.  I've submitted a request for Esri to modify the template to not limit it to only AGOL since it appears to just be some validation that forces you to have an arcgis.com domain, otherwise its the exact same configuration I created manually but had to pay $6/user/month for premium Azure AD to do it. Sorry, I realize this is a bit rambly with little concrete instructions. If you try it out and get stuck, feel free to reach out and I am happy to try and help. ... View more

Yes, we have setup AGS in an Azure VM and integrated it with Azure AD.  It works quite well.  The only thing we haven't been able to do is create database connections to SQL database on Azure using the Azure AD credentials.  It works fine with database authentication. If you still have any questions, post them here and I can try and answer them.  Likewise, if you have figured out how to connect to an Azure hosted SQL Database with Azure AD from ArcMap/Catalog, that would be great to hear. ... View more

Hi Luke, We just updated to 10.3 last week and I hadn't gone to look to see if replicas were showing up in the list until I saw your post and it looks like its working now.  Perhaps it was a bug at 10.2.2 or just something wonky with our install. Either way, I'm happy to forget about this issue and move on! Thanks! Matt ... View more

Yeah, I noticed that as well after I posted.  There was a different spatial reference in the python one because it was set to albers equal area or something and didn't default to web mercator like the other when I added in the basemap.  Both mxd had no other layers in them.  I suppose it does make sense if one is projecting on the fly and causing issues with the thumbnail generation, but it's weird that it effects the entire thumbnail like that, instead of just having missing tiles in the dataframe. I'll try again running this on an entire folder of MXD and see how it works if I make sure the spatial reference is set to web mercator. Thanks for looking at this and taking the time to respond! Appreciate it. Matt ... View more

oddly enough, I tried the exact same thing again today and they both appear to be generating the same thumbnail now.  No idea... ... View more

Hi Xander, I mean that the python generated thumbnail is not maintaining the same aspect ratio as the ArcMap UI generated thumbnail.  This might be the main issue and not actually a resampling issue or change in the quality settings when generating the image.  I changed the code to just work with a single mxd when I was trying to figure out why it didn't seem to be working and was just playing with the python window right in ArcMap.  Here are a couple examples.  the Test2 image was generated from the ArcMap UI and Test1 was from python. Same exact layout in both.  Similar issues with portrait oriented MXD as well.  I saw there was a bug listed for the python methods for making/deleting thumbnails but it didn't mention this issue, but wondering if they are related cause sometimes the arcpy method just doesn't seem to work, especially if you try to run it again on the same MXD. Thanks for the help! Matt ... View more

Sorry, I wasn't very clear when I said "high quality".  I'm not expecting anything but a thumbnail size image, but I did expect them to look the same if I generate them from arcpy or the ArcMap properties dialog.  I'll attach examples tomorrow that show the difference.  Here is the gist of what I'm trying to do. import arcpy, time mxd = arcpy.mapping.MapDocument("CURRENT") basemapLayer = arcpy.mapping.Layer(r"\\psf\Home\Desktop\darkbasemap.lyr") df = arcpy.mapping.ListDataFrames(mxd, "*")[0] arcpy.mapping.AddLayer(df, basemapLayer, "BOTTOM") df.scale = 73957191 #exact tile level. Added this after Rebecca mentioned the cache levels and resampling arcpy.RefreshActiveView() # Added this when trying to solve the resolution issue time.sleep(10) # Added this to see if pausing to allow for tiles to draw would help.  not sure if this does what I think... mxd.makeThumbnail() mxd.save() The thumbnail is generated, but the thumbnail is very poor quality and not proportional, so it seems like it's more than just an issue of tiles being rendered before the thumbnail is generated, but maybe that is an incorrect assumption. Thanks for the help! Matt ... View more

Yep, this has been causing us a lot of issues. Thanks for confirming it was a bug.  Any idea if this is an issue when using hosted feature services in AGOL as well? ... View more

Will do. I already deleted the problem geodatabase, but we'll save one the next time we encounter the issue.  Thanks for the help! ... View more

another bit of info... We have this issue in both the simulator and on a device, but sometimes the simulator will work but then the device throws the extent error. ... View more

Hi Al, We're using 10.2.4, but have had this issue in previous versions as well.  We get this error on new empty databases and existing databases with lots of features, but its not consistent.  Sometimes it works great with no errors and then it will popup seemingly at random.  Normally we setup the source MXD so it covers the entire project area and we use the AGSGDBFeatureServiceInfo fullExtent property to set the extent on the AGSGDBGenerateParameters to grab all the data. The idea is to get everything in the database instead of a smaller specific area of interest within a project, and in the cases of new projects the database may have nothing in it at all, but we want to be able to collect features anywhere within the extent of the feature service Thanks for the help! Matt ... View more