Publish hosted OGC layers

If your organization requires you to use layers that are compliant with Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) specifications, you can publish a hosted OGC feature layer or hosted web feature service (WFS) layer from a hosted feature layer in ArcGIS Online. In addition, when you publish a hosted tile layer, an OGC web map tile service (WMTS) layer is created automatically.

Publishing a hosted OGC feature layer or WFS layer from a hosted feature layer does not make a copy of the data; the hosted OGC feature layer or WFS layer references the same data as the hosted feature layer. The hosted OGC feature or WFS layer is dependent on the hosted feature layer.

You can also publish a hosted OGC feature or WFS layer from a hosted feature layer view. When you do, any view definition set on the view is preserved in the dependent layer.

Hosted OGC feature and WFS layers are read-only. Hosted WFS layers must be shared with everyone to draw correctly.

Note:

If the clients that will consume the feature layer support the OGC API – Features specification, it is recommended that you publish OGC feature layers rather than WFS layers because OGC feature layers in ArcGIS Online provide better performance and scalability.

Follow these steps to publish a hosted WFS layer or hosted OGC feature layer:

1. Publish a hosted feature layer of the data you need.

   You must have privileges to create content and publish hosted feature layers.

2. If you are not already signed in to the organization, do so now.

   Sign in as the owner of the hosted feature layer created in the previous step.

3. Click Content > My content and click the hosted feature layer name in the list to open the item's page.
4. Configure metadata on the hosted feature layer that you want the hosted OGC feature layer or WFS layer to inherit.

   When you publish a hosted WFS layer, the new layer inherits metadata from the hosted feature layer. This metadata also populates the WFS service's capabilities file.

5. Click Publish and choose the OGC layer type to publish.
   • OGC Feature layer
   • WFS
6. Provide a 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.

7. Optionally, type tags and a summary.
8. If your organization has set up content categories, click Assign Category and select up to 20 categories to help users find your item. Optionally, use the Filter categories box to narrow the list of categories.
9. Choose a folder in which to save the hosted OGC feature or WFS layer.
10. Click OK.
11. When publishing of a hosted WFS layer completes, share it with everyone (public).

    You're not required to share an OGC feature layer with everyone but, if you do, it may take a few minutes before anonymous users can access the layer.

Considerations when publishing hosted OGC layers

• If you do not require OGC-compliant layers, use the hosted feature layer rather than publishing OGC layers from it.
• You can publish only one hosted WFS layer from a hosted feature layer.
• The names of layers published as a hosted OGC feature or WFS layers 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 OGC feature or WFS layer, it inherits metadata from the hosted feature layer. Subsequent updates to metadata are not inherited to the layer. For WFS layers, the metadata from the hosted feature layer also populates the OGC WFS service's capabilities document when you publish. Subsequent updates to metadata are not inherited to capabilities document either.
• Symbology, query definitions, field aliases, and related tables and layers are not inherited by the OGC feature or WFS layer.
• Edits you make in the hosted feature layer appear in the dependent OGC feature or WFS layer when clients refresh the dependent layer.
• You must delete dependent OGC feature and WFS layers before you can delete the hosted feature layer from which you published them.
• The administrator cannot reassign ownership of the hosted OGC feature or WFS layer. To change ownership on these layers, you must reassign ownership of the hosted feature layer from which they are published. When you do that, ownership automatically changes on the hosted OGC feature and WFS layers.
• When you publish a WFS layer from a hosted feature layer that contains any of the following field types, those fields will not be included in the WFS layer: big integer, date only, time only, or timestamp offset.