To create offline map areas, you must use web maps created with ArcGIS Online
You can create map areas manually using ArcGIS Online
ArcGIS Online or ArcGIS Enterprise
Use ArcGIS Online
The capability to maintain and download true curves can be enabled in the web map’s advanced offline settings options.
Python scripts
Use ArcGIS API for Python to write python scripts to create offline map areas and generate their associated data packages. See the Managing offline map areas Python topic for details.
- Update the offline map area of an offline map and any of its packages that have been deleted or contain more recent data.
- Delete an individual data package.
- Delete an offline map area along with its associated packages.
- Inspect any of the offline maps’s packages.
- List the web map’s current map areas.
ArcGIS Rest APIs
Use the ArcGIS REST APIs if you need even more control when creating your offline map areas. There are two stages to this process:
- Create an offline map area: Run the Create Map Area task with a bookmark or geographical extent to define the area of interest for a web map that’s enabled for offline use. The task generates a new portal item of type
MapArea. Only the owner of the web map and organization administrators can run this task. - Create the data defined by the map area: Run the Setup Map Area task with the map area portal item ID. This creates a set of data files such as tile packages, vector tile packages, and SQLite geodatabases. For good data management, you should organize these files into folders. Only the owner of the map area portal item owner and organization administrators can run this task.
Define updates
In addition to creating the offline map area, you can also define how users receive updates to the data used in the offline map. Updates can come from the synchronization of the offline map’s geodatabases with their online services or by applying update packages to the geodatabases.
- Synchronization allows you to download updates from the online service and upload edits from the offline map when connectivity is available. You can configure the synchronization direction control how edits are synchronized: download only, upload only, or bi-directional.
- The update packages workflow provides feature service updates in a file that is created according to a packaging schedule that you can specify when you create the offline map area. ArcGIS Maps SDKs for Native Apps can download the required files and apply their updates to the offline map’s geodatabases. These files are relatively small so they are quick to download and fast to apply. This provides a scalable solution for receiving updates to read-only geodatabases and is useful when you need to provide many clients with an up-to-date read-only copy of the feature data. If your geodatabase supports creating new features, then clients may also upload new features to the map as part of the update packages workflow.