Building an Application with ArcGIS Server and the Web ADF

Welcome to the first of many posts on building, using, consuming, and deploying ArcGIS Server services.  Today I want to touch on building a simple web application in the Web ADF for the Microsoft .NET Framework with cached data and a couple of Geoprocessing Tasks. 

Have you ever developed a really nice TIN dataset?  TINs are nice in that they can be built quickly, contain a lot of detail, and can be used to perform traditional GIS analysis.  Let's take the TIN dataset to the next step.  Say we want to publish an application that uses a TIN in the new Web ADF but we want it to perform lightening fast AND be able to do analysis on it? 

I have a TIN that I created with tagged vector contour data that I downloaded from the GIS Clearinghouse for the State of Kansas. 

This TIN took about 20 seconds to draw to the screen from ArcMap.  That is too slow to be useful for web mapping applications.  Fortunately we can take advantage of ArcGIS Server 9.2 caching capabilities.  The steps to publish data to server are as follows:

1. Set up map document in ArcMap with featured dataset(s) rendered appropriately,
2. Publish MXD to Server,
3. Build fused map cache.

The map cache option in ArcGIS Server 9.2 is a really powerful feature.  This allows you to create high performance web applications.  Look for many more posts in the future about designing, building, deploying, and using map caches.  It is a fascinating subject.

Back to work.  The map cache that I created contains the following specifications:

• Tile size 256x256 pixels
• Image type PNG
• Fused map cache
• Cached at the following scales: 100k, 75k, 50k, 24k, 12k, 6k 

Now that the service is ready we can build the web mapping application to consume it.  The team has really done a lot here to help the developer AND the non-developer build web applications.  The web application can be completely built and deployed remotely from the ArcGIS Server Manager.  If the default application does not meet your needs you can customize the application in MS Visual Studio 2005. 

It is really as easy as that.  Try it out here: 

Now while we get the performance of the cached TIN elevation data in the map service, we don't want to lose the analytical capabilities of the original data.   This is where Geoprocessing (GP) Services come into play.  With GP services we can build models that run off of the original data using model builder and then publish those models to ArcGIS Server which can then be used in our web applications.  In this example I want to build a line of sight GP service.  This will take in as input the original TIN dataset along with a feature set input (allowing the user to draw points, lines, & polygons as input to the model).  Here is the model:

Once we deploy the model to the server, we can then access the GP service directly from the web mapping application.  Again just like map caching, GP services are very powerful yet require careful consideration.  When you publish a GP toolbox to the server everything has to be set up to allow the web user to give input, execute, and visualize.  The process must do everything for the user.  That includes assigning layer files to the output of the model for rendering.  We will be revisiting this in detail in future posts. 

I want to add one more model to the application that allows users to draw linear features on the map, extract the vertices from the points of the line, and then add elevation values from the original TIN to the point data set.  Check out the model here:
 

The real test is in the deployment of the application.  Give it a try here.

So what do you think?  

Jeremy