Tutorial: Create an offline map area

Learn how to use the ArcGIS portal to create an offline map area from a web map.

A offline map area, also known as preplanned map area, is a region of a web map that is packaged for offline use. These map areas are defined in the portal using the Manage offline map areas button. Then, your offline app can download these areas, which are quick to access and ready to use. They are prepared in advance and hosted alongside the web map, making the download experience similar to any other file or resource.

In this tutorial, you use the ArcGIS portal to create an offline map area from a web map for your partially offline app.

Prerequisites

Steps

Get the web map

After creating your own offline-enabled web map in the Create an offline-enabled web map tutorial, you are ready to make offline map areas for your web map. If you were to use the completed solution from the tutorial instead, go straight to step 4.

1. Sign in to your ArcGIS portal or ArcGIS Enterprise portal.
2. In the main ribbon, go to Content.
3. Find the web map you created in the Create an offline-enabled web map tutorial and click on it to display the item page.
4. (Optional): If you were using the completed solution instead, you need to save the web map as your own first by doing the following:
   1. In your web browser, go to Santa Monica Parcels Web Map in Map Viewer.
   2. Click Sign in and sign in using your ArcGIS Online or ArcGIS Enterprise credentials.
   3. In the left panel, click Save and Open > Save As and navigate to the folder you want to save the tutorial web map in.
   4. The map is now your own and you can create map areas in it.
   5. In the left panel, click Map Properties and Item Details to display the item page.

Go to web map item settings page

You can manage offline map areas for your web map in the Settings tab in your web map item page.

1. Click Settings on the top panel.
2. Scroll down to the Offline menu.

Draw offline map areas

Now, you are going to define areas in your web map that you want to take offline.

1. Under Offline Map Areas, click Manage Offline Areas.

2. In the left panel, click Create offline area.

3. Draw an offline area on the map. You have two options to do this:

   • To draw a box around the area to take offline, click the Sketch rectangular map area button and draw a box on the map.
   • To draw a polygon to define the area you need to take offline, click the Sketch polygon map area button and draw the polygon on the map.
   

Manage offline map area settings

After defining your offline map areas, you can configure settings such as name, level of detail, and packaging schedule. Then, you will save the offline map area and an offline map package will be generated.

1. In the Name field in the left panel, type a descriptive name for the offline map area.

2. Open the Level of detail setting to change the quality and resolution of the downloaded raster or vector tile layers. You can move the slider to the right for more detail or to the left for less detail. Make sure that the small triangle icon is included in the scope of your slider.

   More info

   Set a level of detail that is appropriate for the offline map area you create. If the level of detail is too great (for example, you set the level of detail to Streets but your offline map area is the size of Spain), you'll receive a warning indicating you must either reduce the offline map area or decrease the level of detail.

3. Open the Packaging schedule section to set the interval and time that you want the offline map area packages to be refreshed to capture changes to feature layer data. If you don't want to set an automatic refresh schedule, select Never from the drop-down menu.

4. Open the Optimizations section to create offline map area packages for read-only use. Then, switch on the Enable packaged updates toggle button. Read-only packages are created based on the schedule you set in the previous step.

5. Click Save.

   More info

   The new offline map area appears in the Offline map areas list with a badge indicating the area is being packaged. Packaging can take several seconds or minutes, depending on the size of the data being packaged.

   Packaging will fail if the size of the offline map area, when packaged, is larger than 2.5 GB. If packaging fails, try sketching a smaller area to include in the offline map package. If the map contains feature layers that have attachments, you can exclude attachments from the offline package to decrease the package size. If the map includes tile layers, you can decrease the size of the offline map area by adjusting the level of detail to include less detail.

6. To create more offline areas for this map, click Create offline area and repeat the previous steps starting from Draw offline map areas. You can create up to 16 offline map areas per web map.

What's next?

Learn how to use the offline map areas in a partially offline app.