Creating and Uploading Tile Caches

You can create tile caches for anything you can display in ArcMap. That includes raster data like aerial or satellite photography, multiple layers of stylized vector data or any combination of them both. Tile caches are a fast and efficient way to display your maps online and the tile caches created with Arc2Earth can be used in Google Maps, Microsoft Bing, OpenLayers and ArcGIS.com

There are normally two parts to creating tile caches:
1. The cache itself, a local folder where all of the necessary image files will be placed. If you are using the standard Google Maps naming convention, several child folders are also created and contain the images for each level. The Microsoft VE naming convention is not used as much anymore but if you choose it, the tiles will all be in the root folder
2. Viewers - You can optionally use online or custom viewers to view your newly created tile cache. Also, you can upload your cache to either Amazon S3 or an Arc2Earth Cloud and use them from any custom online viewer or ArcGIS.com. Note that you do not need a viewer, many A2E users just copy the cache folder to thier own server and use it from their own workflow.

Creating Tile Caches

First, create a map that you would like to publish taking care to setup symbols, renderers and labels that will look best with the map scales that are used for World Mercator tile caches. ESRI has a great article on these map scales and how best to plan for your map for them here . Another good tip is to zoom in a small area of your map and export that first for testing. Once you are happy with the output, either use the "Export Full Map Extent" option of zoom to your final output area. All exports to S3 and ArcGIS.com are updated no matter how many times you export

Once your map is ready, we're ready to setup the A2E tile exporter. On the A2E Toolbar, click the Export menu item and select "Create Map Tiles"

General Tab

1. Set the Name property to something unique for your data. This will be the name of your MapService as well, so it should be descriptive. Do not use any special characters or spaces
   
2. Fill in the metadata to give your map a Title and description. For more metadata, use the "Advanced" button on the Viewers tab
   
3. Set the Opacity of your map, by default there is none. A good value for overlay maps is 70, or 30% transparent
   
4. if you are exporting Raster data, make sure to set your Image Format to Jpeg

Levels

The default levels that will be exported are determined by your map's current extent, so they may not represent the total amount of levels you need. Use the level selectors to change these values but pay close attention to the number of tiles that this will create for map extent (see textbox to the right). The more tiles, the longer it will take to export

Advanced Level Options 1. Create Mercator Tiles - If this unchecked, no tiles will be created but the metadata for map and viewers will still be processed. This is great way to update existing tile caches with new viewer information without having to re-export all of the tiles
2. Restart - Occasionally, the exporter process will crash due to a variety of ArcGIS or operating system issues. These values can be used to restart the export from the last good location. The last level and tile chunk can be found in the DebugLog (Help->Options->Show Debug Log)
3. Exclusion Mask - a polygon layer that tells the exporter what portion of your extent to ignore. For example, if you have large areas where no data is present (ex Ocean, large lake etc) you can tell the exporter to skip these areas and dramatically speed up exports. You should try to use layers that have course grain polygons, the more detail in the mask the longer it will take to process.
4. Inclusion Mask - a polygon layer that tells the exporter what areas of the map to export. The exporter then jumps to each of these extents and ignores the rest of the map extent. This option is almost always used for updating small portions of a large cache, for example where you know you have feature edits.
5. Change Detection Level - he level used for change detection when exporting against an existing cache with tiles that are drawn using the same symbology as your current map. When changes are detected, a new entry for the area is added to the Inclusion mask. All subsequent levels will only use the Inclusion mask areas for tile cutting. Best practise for choosing a level will vary based on map symbology and any scale dependent renderers in the map but for most cases, this level can be set to 2 levels above your end level. This functionality can dramatically speed up tile cache maintenance where changes are minimal but unevenly spread across a cache extent. (ex: a Tax Parcel map cache that is updated each week with a hundred edits spread across the entire municipal extent). Since lower map levels take the longest to draw, this process seeks to remove large areas that do not need to be redrawn.
6. Command Line - Use the command line tools to launch the exporter from your own workflow. For large caches, this is the recommended method for exporting tiles

Storage

This tab tells the exporter where to store your tiles. By default, they are created locally under your MyDocuments\KMLDocuments folder. You can change this location using the top textbox to either a local or network drive location.

Amazon S3 Cache 1. Select Amazon S3 from the dropdown for your remote storage location.
2. Click the Accounts button and select the S3 account you created prior to this step
3. The values from the account will be set automatically however, you can change these manually afterwards. For instance, you could change the Bucket name to something other then your default value

Arc2Earth Cloud Instance Cache 1. Select Arc2Earth Cloud from the dropdown for your remote storage location.
2. Click the Accounts button and select a GMail account that has Admin access to your Cloud Instance
3. Select the Cloud Instance from the dropdown where the cache will be uploaded to
4. Give the cache a name that does not conflict with any existing tile caches on that Cloud instance. If you match an existing tile cahe name, you will append new tiles to its content. The cache will then be available from http://yourAppName.appspot.com/a2e/data/tilesets/YourCacheName

Viewers

The final tab allows you specify how you want your newly created map tiles to be display. Many A2E users do not use these values at all, they simply use the tile cache that is created in their own web pages. However, with the advent of ArcGIS.com, you may want to use these new default values to publish your data. The ArcGIS.com are:

ArcGIS.com

1. Create ArcGIS Server tile cache - Use this option to make your S3 storage look like a real ArcGIS Map Server. It is not a real map server though, it can only serve tiles and as such, it will not be usable from some client applications. Most notably, the ArcGIS.com javascript administration application, which makes heavy use of AJAX/JSONP and thus, needs a real server to interact with. Compiled application like ArcGIS Explorer Online, the Flex api and the iPhone app do not need JSONP and can work directly against the tile cache
   
2. Publish to ArcGIS.com - This option will use your ArcGIS.com account to publish both a MapServer and Web Map to your "My Contents" area.
   
3. Public Access - Uncheck this value if you would like to keep your Web Map private, you can then assign access to other Users or Groups using the tools on ArcGIS.com

Click the Export button and monitor the status of the process using the Progress Window. It is important to check this log when the export complete to see if anything has failed. Most notably, if any layers in your map do not have Spatial References set they will not display in your tiles and will show up in this log