Geoprocessing services

Geoprocessing services allow users to leverage geoprocessing models that run on the server. This can be useful for large organizations who wish to centralize both their data and their geoprocessing operations. Once published, geoprocessing services can be used by a number of different client applications, including ArcGIS Explorer and ArcGIS Desktop.

To publish a geoprocessing service, you first capture the geoprocessing operations you want to run in a model or group of models. Then do one of the following:

A geoprocessing service is just like any other toolbox in that it contains tools and toolsets and can be added to ArcToolbox. Anyone with an Internet connection can execute tools found in the service. When you execute a tool found in the service, it executes on the server computer, using the resources of that computer, freeing your computer to do other things.

Geoprocessing services can also be used to create tasks in ArcGIS Explorer and Web applications created with the Web ADF.

Preparing geoprocessing models for publishing

To learn about preparing geoprocessing models for running on the server, see the following topics in the ArcGIS Desktop Help:

Creating the geoprocessing service

Once you have a toolbox or a map document with a tool layer that you want to publish, you can create the geoprocessing service using Manager. To do this, follow the steps in Publishing a GIS resource to the server, keeping in mind the following:

Using a geoprocessing service

You can use ArcGIS Explorer to consume a geoprocessing service, or you can develop a client application yourself using ArcGIS Server.

Web service URL syntax

A geoprocessing service with Web access enabled can be consumed directly through it's Web service description language (WSDL). The URL of a geoprocessing service follows this pattern:

http://<server name>:8399/<instance name>/services/<folder name (if the service resides in a folder)>/<service name>/gpserver.

For example, if you had a service ForestClip in the folder Ecology running on a server named myServer with the default instance name of "arcgis", the URL would look like this:

http://myServer:8399/arcgis/services/Ecology/ForestClip/gpserver