What is a feature service?

License:

To publish your data using feature access with ArcGIS Server, you must have an appropriate ArcGIS Server license. Refer to the functionality matrix for licensing requirements.

Feature services allow you to serve features over the Internet and provide the symbology to use when displaying the features. Clients can execute queries to get features and perform edits that can be applied to the server. Feature services provide templates that can be used for an enhanced editing experience on the client. Data from relationship classes and nonspatial tables can also be queried and edited using feature services.

To use a feature service, the following steps are required:

1. Authoring feature services:

   The authoring process defines what will be exposed by the feature service. This is done by preparing a map document.

2. Publishing feature services:

   The next step is to publish the map document as a map service. Enabling the feature access capability during publishing creates the feature service.

3. Using feature services:

   Once published, clients can query or edit the data using the feature service.