ArcMap

Open a draft service in ArcMap

When you publish a service or create a service definition using the Service Editor in ArcMap, you'll occasionally need to come back to your service configuration at a later time. For example, if you attempt to publish a map service but notice there are a substantial number of errors after analyzing your map document, you may need to close ArcMap and come back to correct those errors in a future session. If you encounter this scenario in your work, you can save your service or service definition configuration as a draft when you close the Service Editor.

You can think of a draft service or draft service definition as a work in progress. Although the draft may contain all the service properties you want to include for the service, a draft has not been compiled; that is, it does not contain any GIS resources and data that might be published to the server or staged locally on disk. Once you complete your draft and commit to publishing your service or saving your service definition, your GIS resources and data are compiled and the draft is deleted.

Using ArcMap or ArcCatalog, you can quickly open a draft service or draft service definition. For simplicity, a draft service or draft service definition will be referred to as a draft for the remainder of this topic.

To get started, follow these steps.

  1. Follow the directions in the table below based on where your draft is saved:

    OptionDescription

    Open a draft that was configured for a specific ArcGIS Server connection

    Double-click the connection in ArcCatalog or the Catalog window and expand the Drafts folder.

    Open a draft that was configured with no available connection to ArcGIS Server

    Browse to the draft in ArcCatalog or the Catalog window in ArcMap.

  2. Right-click the draft and click Open Draft. The Service Editor opens, revealing where you left off during your last session.

  3. From this point, you can continue your work, such as analyzing for errors, writing an item description, defining a caching schema, and so on. Additionally, you can make changes to the map document or other GIS resource associated with your draft.