If your organization requires you to use feature layers compliant with Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) specifications, you can publish a hosted WFS layer from a hosted feature layer in the portal.
Publishing a hosted WFS layer from a hosted feature layer does not make a copy of the data; the hosted WFS layer references the same data as the hosted feature layer. The hosted WFS layer is dependent on the hosted feature layer.
You can also publish a hosted WFS layer from a hosted feature layer view. When you do, the initial definition set on the view is preserved in the WFS layer.
Hosted WFS layers are read-only and must be shared with everyone to draw correctly.
Follow these steps to publish a hosted WFS layer:
- Publish a hosted feature layer of the data you need.
You must have privileges to create content and publish hosted feature layers.
- If you are not already signed in to the portal, do so now.
Sign in as the owner of the hosted feature layer created in the previous step.
- Click Content > My Content and click the hosted feature layer name in the list to open the item's page.
- Configure metadata on the hosted feature layer that you want the hosted WFS layer to inherit.
When you publish a hosted WFS layer, the WFS layer inherits metadata from the hosted feature layer. This metadata also populates the WFS service's capabilities file.
- Click Publish > WFS.
- Fill in Title for the new layer.
The title must start with a letter or underscore (_). It can contain letters, numbers, hyphens (-), underscores, or periods (.) but cannot contain spaces.
- Optionally, type tags and a summary.
- If the organization administrator configured content categories, click Assign Category and select up to 20 categories to help people find your item. You can also use the Filter categories box to narrow down the list of categories.
- Choose a folder in which to save the hosted WFS layer.
- Click OK.
- Once publishing completes, share the hosted WFS layer with everyone (public).
Considerations when publishing hosted WFS layers
- You can publish only one hosted WFS layer from a hosted feature layer.
- The names of layers published as a hosted WFS layer can contain only single-byte, UTF-8 characters. If the layer name contains multibyte characters (such as certain Greek or Cyrillic characters, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters, or characters with diacritical marks such as an umlaut), the hosted WFS layer may not draw as expected.
- You must share hosted WFS layers with everyone.
- When you publish a hosted WFS layer, the WFS layer inherits metadata from the hosted feature layer. This metadata also populates the WFS service's capabilities. Subsequent updates to metadata are not inherited to the layer or the capabilities document.
- Symbology, query definitions, and field aliases are not inherited by the WFS layer.
- Edits you make in the hosted feature layer appear in the hosted WFS layer when clients refresh the WFS layer.
- WFS layers published from hosted feature layer views do not incorporate changes to the view definition. To reflect view definition changes in the WFS layer, you must delete the WFS layer and republish it from the view.
- You must delete the hosted WFS layer before you can delete the hosted feature layer from which you published.
- The administrator cannot reassign ownership of the hosted WFS layer. To change ownership of the hosted WFS layer, you must reassign ownership of the hosted feature layer from which it is published. When you do that, ownership automatically changes on the hosted WFS layer.