ESRI integration

[goldpbear]

The purpose of this issue is to document configuration patterns we encounter when trying to work with ESRI data, and hopefully formulate strategies for dealing with different situations.

A lot of public data is made available over ESRI REST Services endpoints. While we do have a way to use such endpoints in Mapseed (via the esri-leaflet-renderers package), performance and appearance tend to be poor.

Certain ESRI endpoints expose open formats, including WMS, WMTS and GeoJSON, but it seems to be up to the agency or organization that controls the data whether or not to expose these services. In practice there's a grab-bag of formats available.

Below are a few configuration patterns we've encountered and examples of each.

WMS

A WMS request for metadata might look like this: https://www.fws.gov/wetlands/arcgis/services/Wetlands/MapServer/WMSServer?request=GetCapabilities&service=WMS

We can use Leaflet to construct a series of calls to WMS endpoints to retrieve tiles.

WMTS

WMTS is a cached version of WMS. A request for metadata might look like this: https://basemap.nationalmap.gov/arcgis/rest/services/USGSHydroCached/MapServer/WMTS?request=GetCapabilities&service=WMTS

We can use a Leaflet plugin to construct calls to WMTS endpoints. Performance tends to be quite good.

GeoJSON

A request for data might look like this: https://fortress.wa.gov/dnr/arcgisext/weba_ext_prod3/rest/services/Geology/WADNR_Surface_Geology_Web_Mercator/MapServer/28/query?where=1%3D1&f=geojson

Note that GeoJSON requests are often rate-limited, and a single request may only return a subset of the full data. Check the MaxRecordCount parameter in the metadata to see the rate limit for a given endpoint.

ESRI JSON

A sample request might look like:
https://fortress.wa.gov/ecy/ecyprodgislb/arcgis/rest/services/TCP/CleanupSitesStatic/MapServer/0/query?where=1%3D1&f=json

ESRI format

A sample request might look like this:
https://fortress.wa.gov/dnr/arcgisext/weba_ext_prod3/rest/services/Geology/WADNR_Surface_Geology_Web_Mercator/MapServer/28