Marie Kondo Your Hosted Layers in ArcGIS Online or Portal
How to create a simple layer catalogue for your ArcGIS Online or Portal items
In recent years, ArcGIS has transformed from a desktop based mapping app to a web based platform where your maps and apps can be shared easily. With the emergence of ArcGIS Online or ArcGIS Enterprise, many organisations have started moving their spatial data from a local Enterprise Geodatabase to a hosted environment online where they are available 24/7. However, not much thought has been put into organising the enterprise data. If someone is doing a data audit or simply wanting to know what authoritative data is available for their organisation, they will quickly be overwhelmed by all sorts of content on the platform (tables, layers, maps, apps, some authoritative, some deprecated) being shared in different groups. They can use tags and categories to search for data, but only if they know what they are looking for. Many people still reminisce about the good old days of SDE or Enterprise Geodatabase where all authoritative data was listed in ArcCatalog, and they could easily browse through and have all the corporate layers in one place.
With FME and ArcGIS REST API, you can easily create a one page layer catalogue of all your authoritative layers like this one:
Today I’m going to show you how to create this simple layer catalogue in FME.
First, Marie Kondo your hosted layers in ArcGIS Online or Portal. I usually move all corporate layers to a built-in account like GISAdmin or DataOwner so users know that any content owned by this account is authoritative. Then give it a meaningful title, mark it as Authoritative, and select a Category and Credits (where the data comes from). IMPORTANT: You must assign the layer to one Category only. The Layer Catalogue will use the Categories as layer groupings.
Download this FME Workbench one-page-doc.fmw from the GitHub Page:
enricshen/one-page-doc (github.com)
Run the workbench and fill in these parameters:
In under a minute, you will be able to create an easy to read layer catalogue of all corporate layers in your ArcGIS Online or Portal. Users will be able to browse through what data is available in your organisation. Because it is a one page HTML document, you can easily email it to anyone, host it on your website or embed in ArcGIS Experience Builder.
A simple summary of what this workbench does:
AttributeManager_2 creates the header of the HTML report, including style, font and branding. AttributeManager_9 creates the footer of the report and some JavaScript code to enhance browsability.
The middle part is the essence of this workflow:
The first set of HTTPCallers brings you a token from ArcGIS Online or Portal. The second HTTPCaller sends a query to ArcGIS REST API and the API returns all content owned by the specific user (GISAdmin in this example) in JSON format.
The AttributeExposer exposes the metadata from each layer:
Then the layers are grouped by what Category they belong to:
A Navigation Menu is created on the left hand side. And the item descriptions are on the right hand side.
Here you go. Now you have an overview of all your corporate layers in one place. Does it spark joy?