Viewing your service in a web map

Each GIS web service has its own specific purpose. It may support analysis performed inside an organization, or it may be intended to be used by anyone on the web. In this lesson, we'll assume that the Appalachian Trail service you just published is intended to be used by anyone on the web to explore and use in their own maps.

So, how could someone use your trails service in their own web map? A programmer could put the URL of your service directly into web app code and then write appropriate code to display the map. That's a topic for a different course, and ultimately writing code is something that many people cannot or will not do. In this part of the lesson, you'll use the ArcGIS Online map viewer, an interactive web map designing tool, to see how you can put together several services into a web map.

You might say that the ArcGIS Online map viewer is "running on the cloud". It is software as a service (SaaS), meaning you don't have to install any software in order to use it. When you save maps on ArcGIS Online, they are not saved to your computer, rather they are saved on an Esri server. You can come back and work with your maps from any computer as long as you tell the application who you are by logging in.

To perform this exercise, your Amazon EC2 instance must be running, but you can do the steps on your local computer.

1. Open a web browser to the ArcGIS Online homepage.
   
   You can use the ArcGIS.com map viewer without signing in; however, you will sign in so that you can save and re-use your maps.
2. Click the Sign In link, and choose the Your ArcGIS organization's URL option. We will login using Penn State's ArcGIS Online Organization, in which all Penn State students automatically have accounts. Enter "pennstate" to connect to the Penn State organization at pennstate.maps.arcgis.com, and sign in with your regular Penn State Access ID.
3. Click the Map link near the top of the screen. This takes you to the map viewer.
   
   You learned in an earlier part of the lesson that a web map typically consists of a basemap and operational layers. The map viewer gives you a basemap already.
4. Change the basemap service by clicking the Basemap icon and choosing Imagery.
   
   You can experiment with some of the other basemaps if desired. The trails service is symbolized with an imagery basemap in mind.
   
   Now you'll add the operational layer, which is your trails service. Notice that although the trails service has several layers inside (Shelters and Trail), it's common to refer to the entire service as one layer in the context of the web map.
5. Click the Layers icon and choose Add > Add Layer from Url.
6. Change the drop-down to ArcGIS Server Web Service and type the full URL of the service on your server in the URL box and hit Add to map. The URL takes the format https://namegeog865.e-education.psu.edu/server/rest/services/<your service name>/MapServer.
   
   To get the full URL of your service, you can open a separate browser window and enter the following, https://namegeog865.e-education.psu.edu/server/rest/services. You should see a hyperlink on the rest services page for your map service. Click it, and note the URL in the browser. This is what you can copy and paste into the ArcGIS Online map above.
7. Find your trail service and add it to the map.
   
   Go ahead and explore your web map, perhaps zooming in to some shelters at a large scale (where you can see the shelter labels). You can also experiment with the buttons at the top of the table of contents, such as Legend.
8. Position your map on a place of interest to you, and save your map using the icon in the menu along the left.
9. Enter a title, tags, and summary for your map, and click Save Map. Tags are just key terms that can aid others who may be searching or browsing for maps.
   
   If you want to see or return to any maps you have saved, you can click Content > My Content. This screen also gives you the option to share your map with the public. Sharing your map at this time is not recommended because your server is stopped most of the time, so this map will not be of much use to the browsing public.

So, what good is this map that you've made? As mentioned above, if you have a permanently running server with a permanent address, you might choose to save your map and share it with the public. People could then search for and view the map in ArcGIS.com. Another way the map can be used is by web app developers. Each map saved on ArcGIS.com is assigned an ID. Esri has designed their web programming frameworks (APIs) for JavaScript, Flex, and Silverlight such that a developer can just reference a map ID in the code, rather than building the map "from scratch".