Discovering Spatial Data Server feature services

Spatial Data Server (SDS) provides a REST-ful web service as a gateway to data tables in a database. The ArcGIS Runtime SDK for Java uses this Representational State Transfer (REST) interface to query and display spatial data in the database. The SDS REST application programming interface (API) provides a services directory browser application you can use to discover information about the databases and tables available via the service. In most cases, you will use the services directory to discover information about a table, construct spatial and attribute queries, and retrieve the uniform resource locator (URL) you'll need to use the table in your application.

Opening the SDS directory

To open the SDS directory, you must know the URL of the server. SDS is typically available off the web server's root in the "SDS" directory which databases directory of named database instances. For example, if an ArcGIS for Server instance is available at www.example.com, the SDS directory would be located at http://www.example.com/sds/databases.

Note:

The SDS name can be changed by the server administrator and may not be sds.

Contact your SDS administrator if you are uncertain about the URL to the SDS.

Finding information about a table

Use the SDS directory to obtain information you need to display geographic data in the ArcGIS Runtime SDK for Java. In most cases, you will copy a table's URL from the address bar in your browser and paste it in your code. For example, a table named WorldCities_Geographic and hosted via the SDS on the web server serverapps.esri.com, may have a URL of http://serverapps.esri.com/sds/databases/Demo/dbo.WorldCities_Geographic. In this example, Demo is a SQL Server database in which the table resides. The dbo prefix on the table represents the schema. A schema is a named, logical container for database objects, such as tables.

The Services directory also allows you to query table content. Click the Query link (shown in the preceding screen shot) at the bottom of the page to open a dialog box that enables you to construct attribute and spatial queries. Both spatially enabled tables (tables that have at least one spatial column of the data type Geometry or Geography) or non-spatially enabled tables are listed and can be queried.