Add your own Map Services to ArcGIS iOS Apps

The ArcGIS iOS app is a pretty cool general purpose app for accessing maps from your phone.Of course the first thing I wanted to do was add my own data into it.

When I used “Find Maps” in the app, one of the options is “ArcGIS Servers” – great! When I went to go and add my server, I noticed that the app is expecting a url like <yourserver>/arcgis/mobile. I went with my typical “damn the torpedos approach and entered the url to a REST map service anyhow. And… it crashed the app. Ok, so that’s not gonna work.

At the UC TweetUp I ran into my old friend Dave Cardella, who’s deeply involved with the iOS app development. He pointed out that the iOS app needs to consume a “map” (not a map service or a “map document” – this is another animal) and pointed me to the Publishing a Map pdf that’s up on the iOS resource center.

So, while enjoying the sound and light show that is the Plenary, I thought I’d try to get this working. Here’s how you do it.

Step 1: You need ArcGIS Server 10, so stop now if you’re still rockin 9.3.1. If you’re stuck on 9.3.1, you can publish a map on ArcGIS.com using your services, and then consume that from the iOS app. If you have a v10 instance, you can use that to publish the “map”, but point the “map” at your 9.3 REST end-point (which is more or less what ArcGIS.com would be doing for you)

Step 2: Go to your http://your.server.com/Arcgis/mobile/content/MobileWeb/Maps (example: http://ags.dtsagile.com/ArcGIS/Mobile/Content/MobileWeb/Maps)

Step 3: Ok, now it gets fun because we need to hack up some JSON… so open your text editor weapon-o-choice and get funky with it.

{    "version":"1.1",    "operationalLayers":[       {          "url":"http://ags.dtsagile.com/ArcGIS/rest/services/Wx/NEXRAD/MapServer",          "visibility":true,          "opacity":0.75,          "title":"NEXRAD"       }   ],    "baseMap":{       "baseMapLayers":[          {             "url":"http://services.arcgisonline.com/ArcGIS/rest/services/World_Street_Map/MapServer"          }       ],       "title":"Street Map"    } }

Ok, so that’s kind ugly, but basically you pick a basemap, and then throw your map service on top of that. This is JSON, so be really careful with those curly brackets and commas.

Step 4: Click the “Add” button – this will prompt you to login – needs to be a member of the agsadmins group on the server.

Step 5: Fill out the form. Items of note: the Json goes into the “Text” field. And you need to give it an extent in GCS (guys – why can that not be discovered???) Click Save and hopefully you’ll get a “Success: true” screen. (Could use a little User Experience love here)

Step 6: Fire up the iOS app, go to Find Maps, Add ArcGIS Server, and enter your newly setup service. If you just want to pull in some services, use http://184.73.175.237/ArcGIS/Mobile which is out ArcGIS cloud instance. After adding the server, you can see the “maps” that you’ve published. Right now I’ve got 3 maps up there that you can poke at…

Step 7: Pick a map and drink in the awesomeness! Having just cooked up a variety of mobile web apps, the performance of the native app shows why

Dave tells me that the will streamline this, but for now, this is your jimmy Have fun!