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 Web Mapping Applications, 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:

• Publish the toolbox containing these models to the GIS Server.
• Add the models to the ArcMap table of contents as tool layers. Then save the map document and publish the map document to the GIS Server.

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:

• An overview of sharing tools and toolboxes
• An overview of sharing tools on an ArcGIS server
• Considerations for authoring and publishing models

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:

• When specifying the resource, browse either to a toolbox, or a map document with a tool layer.
• If you browsed to a map document with a tool layer, in the next panel be sure that the box is checked for the Geoprocessing capability. A geoprocessing service and an associated map service will both be published.

If you need further help creating the model and the service, you can refer to following help topics:

• Tutorial: Publishing a geoprocessing service (Shows how to use the service in a Web Mapping Application)
• Example geoprocessing service (Shows how to use the service in ArcMap)
• Example map service with geoprocessing (Shows how to use the service in ArcMap)

Using a geoprocessing service

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

• ArcMap and ArcCatalog are both supported clients of geoprocessing services. In both applications, when you have ArcToolbox open, you can use the Add Toolbox option and browse to a geoprocessing service. The service will appear in the toolbox alongside the others, and its tools can be invoked in the same way.

• When you publish a map service with a tool layer, you can add that map service as data in ArcGIS Explorer to expose the functionality of the model. The workflow is to configure a task in ArcGIS Explorer based on the geoprocessing service that was created from the tool layer. The associated map service displays the results of the task.
• In much the same way, the Web ADF contains a geoprocessing task that you can configure to work with a geoprocessing service. See Configuring tasks to learn how to add a geoprocessing task to your application.
• If you are developing your own client application, you can use the ArcGIS Server libraries to work with the geoprocessing service and run the model. For further instructions and samples, see the Geoprocessing Functionality discussion in the Developer Help (.NET).

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>/<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/arcgis/services/Ecology/ForestClip/gpserver