Configuration

In the so-called "backstage" of ArcGIS® Pro, you should see a GeoCat Bridge tab after you installed it. You can go there by clicking on the Project item in Pro's menu bar, or by clicking on the Settings button in the GeoCat Bridge toolbar.

Data Spaces

When you visit the Bridge backstage for the first time, the Data Spaces tab will be displayed.

Community Edition users will see a fixed data space configuration (GeoCat Live Demo) here, which can be used to try out the publishing features of GeoCat Bridge.
Note that all users can add additional data spaces, but only licensed users may use them for publishing.

Add a new data publisher by clicking on the + Add button. This will display an empty form.

Tip

You can change the auto-generated name of the new data publisher by clicking on the blue underlined title:

The following sections will provide some details on what to fill in.
When you're done, click the Save button to store your configuration on disk. Note that Bridge will also ask you to save it if there are unsaved changes.

Note

If you see one or more pre-configured data spaces (besides the GeoCat Live Demo one), it could mean that these have been configured by an administrator.

You may not be able to modify these data spaces (if a symbol is displayed), but you can still add your own.

What is a Data Space?

Although the actual definition of a data space means much more, from a Bridge perspective it simply is a combination of server connections that allow you to share your map with other users on the Internet. It makes your data publicly visible and discoverable.

To achieve that, a data space consists of:

• A Map Service to publish geodata and symbology to GeoServer, or browse its contents;
• A Catalog Service to publish metadata to GeoNetwork. In the near future, you will also be able to use this connection to search for data (and add it to your map).

You can configure either one of these, or set up both. The latter option is typical for an SDI (Spatial Data Infrastructure), where you want your maps and metadata to stay together.

If you publish to both services, Bridge will establish links between the map data (e.g. GeoServer WMS layers) and the metadata record in the catalog service.
This means your map can be discovered by the catalog service, but that you can also obtain the metadata record from the WMS.

Map Service

Once you clicked the + Add button to add a new data space, you can configure a Map Service. For now, only GeoServer is supported.

Connection

On the Connection tab, set the host URL (i.e. the address) and specify the username and password to authenticate yourself with the server.
Note that Bridge only supports Basic Authentication at the moment. Therefore, it is recommended to use secure connections (HTTPS).

Tip

If you wish to verify if Bridge can establish a connection, click on the Test Connection... button.
When the connection fails, a red warning symbol will appear. If you click that, a pop-up will open with more details.

General

On the General tab, you can configure GeoServer-specific options that will apply to all published maps. Currently, you can only set up the GeoServer layer group mode here.

Feature Storage

The Feature Storage settings determine how Bridge should process all vector datasets.

At the moment, there only 2 ways that you can publish your feature layers:

1. Referencing a PostGIS database: this means that your map service (GeoServer) can access the same database as your ArcGIS Pro map. No data has to be copied online, GeoServer only needs to reference that table and publish a feature layer.
2. Copying the data to a GeoServer file-based datastore: this means that Bridge will push a GeoPackage to GeoServer, where it will be served from disk as a feature layer.

Warning

The PostGIS connection details that you may specify are the ones that GeoServer should use to access the data tables.

The connection settings may differ from the ones that you use in ArcGIS Pro. What matters is that the native table name in ArcGIS Pro also exists for the database, schema, and user you specify on the GeoServer side.

There currently is no mechanism in place that checks if a tables exists in the database connection on the GeoServer side, or that the database connection itself is correct. Your publication could fail in that case.

Raster Storage

The Raster Storage settings determine how Bridge should process all raster datasets.

At the moment, there only 2 ways that you can publish your raster layers:

1. Referencing a GeoTIFF or ECW: this means that your map service (GeoServer) can access the same directory as ArcGIS Pro (e.g. a shared network drive). No data has to be copied online, GeoServer only needs to reference the existing raster data and publish a layer.
2. Copying the data to a GeoServer file-based datastore: this means that Bridge will push a COG file (Cloud-optimized GeoTIFF) or ECW to GeoServer, where it will be served from disk as a raster layer.

If you wish to use the first option, you may need to set up one or more Path Mappings to map "local" file paths (on the ArcGIS Pro side) to remote paths that GeoServer can access.

Local paths are case-insensitive UNC or Windows paths, whereas the remote paths often tend to be case-sensitive Linux paths.
However, Bridge will try and match the paths in a case-insensitive manner. When a replacement takes place, the actual casing is respected.

Catalog Service

If you wish to make your map discoverable, you may wish to configure a Catalog Service as well. For now, only GeoNetwork is supported.

Connection

On the Connection tab, set the host URL (i.e. the address) and specify the username and password to authenticate yourself with the server.
Note that Bridge only supports Basic Authentication at the moment, so it is recommended to use secure connections (HTTPS).

Tip

If you wish to verify if Bridge can establish a connection, click on the Test Connection... button.
When the connection fails, a red warning symbol will appear. If you click that, a pop-up will open with more details.

Metadata

The Metadata tab allows you to configure how Bridge should retrieve and optionally update source metadata records for this particular data space configuration.

Options

Some options in GeoCat Bridge are independent of the configured data space(s). These settings apply globally and affect the way how Bridge behaves or handles server communication, map publishing, and metadata.

Note

You may experience that the Options page cannot be edited and appears to be grayed out.
If Bridge has been pre-configured by an administrator, you cannot modify the global options.

We will now briefly discuss some of the available options.
Note that the options that are not mentioned below, should have a button next to them in the user interface, which will provide a brief explanation if you click it or hover over it.

Application

On the Application tab, you can configure application-wide settings.

Publish Map button behavior

When you click the Publish Map button in the Bridge ribbon toolbar, the regular behavior is the same as all the other publish buttons: the Publisher pane will open, and you can alter some settings (like the target workspace) and evaluate the staged layers.

However, the button can also behave as a "one-click publishing" button. In that case, the Publisher pane shows up and immediately starts publishing. This means that you cannot set the target workspace, but its name will be derived from the active map instead, following RFC 3986 naming conventions.

Warning

Existing workspaces with the same name will be overwritten without warning if you chose to start publishing immediately. You will lose all data in that workspace, so be careful with this option.
However, Bridge will try to re-apply the settings of the original workspace.

For more information about workspaces in Bridge, look here.

Publishable layers

By default, Bridge will only publish layers that are visible in the ArcGIS Pro Table of Contents (TOC). However, you can also choose to publish all layers in the map, regardless of their visibility.

If you decide to only publish visible layers, GeoCat Bridge will warn you that a layer will be skipped during the publication staging process.

Logging

GeoCat Bridge logs its activities to a file on disk, which can be found in the same location as the add-in (GeoCat.Bridge.esriAddinX) file itself, which usually is in C:\Users\<username>\Documents\ArcGIS\AddIns\ArcGISPro\{9d56cd06-73bd-4e0e-bca4-3c037e21aecb}. (1)

1. ArcGIS Pro needs a unique identifier for each add-in, and 9d56cd06-73bd-4e0e-bca4-3c037e21aecb happens to be the ID of GeoCat Bridge.

If you experience issues with Bridge, it may be helpful to set the logging level to Verbose. This may provide more details about what is going wrong.

Connectivity

On the Connectivity tab, you can configure the HTTP settings for Bridge. For example, you can adjust the request timeouts, or add set additional headers.

It is recommended to keep the default settings.

Data

On the Data tab, you can control how Bridge handles the publication of certain ArcGIS Pro layer data sources.

Style

On the Style tab, you can set how Bridge handles certain things related to map and layer styling.

Metadata

On the Metadata tab, you can control how Bridge handles the publication of layer metadata. These settings apply to all catalog services that Bridge may be publishing to.

Metadata origin

In ArcGIS Pro, layer metadata can come from 2 different sources:

1. The layer itself, which is stored in the ArcGIS Pro project file (.aprx).
2. Source metadata, which is stored in a separate XML record next to the data source.

In the Properties dialog of each individual layer, you can change which metadata source type should be used.

Most professional users will probably have their metadata next to the source data itself, and do not wish to set all individual layer metadata properties.
To accomodate this, Bridge can be set to always use the source metadata, and ignore the layer metadata setting. Only if the metadata source is empty (i.e. not found), it may resort to the layer metadata if that was set.

Group layer metadata

In ArcGIS Pro, group layers can never have source metadata, which means that the metadata is stored in the group layer itself (if present).

Most professional users however, may not want to publish group layer metadata at all.
After all, group layers are virtual layers. The data layers themselves hold the actual metadata.

Metadata resource links

When you publish metadata to a catalog service, GeoCat Bridge will include links to various resources (e.g. WMS, WFS, etc.), provided that the layers were published to GeoServer as well.

If you have already added resource links yourself, you may wish to keep them. In that case, you can set this option to Keep all existing references or to Replace similar references. In the first case, GeoCat Bridge will simply append the resources to whatever is there. In the second case, it will replace all resource links that point to the same GeoServer connection, but keep the links that point to another server (e.g. ArcGIS).