What's new in ArcGIS Mobile 9.3

Alot is new! ArcGIS Mobile has undergone a rapid period of maturing, where features and functionality have gone from our inception at 9.2 into your working world. As our customers have leveraged this new technology to build their GIS applications we have been gathering their feedback. While the core features of the Mobile SDK remain in the new release, there are many enhancements and additions. The Mobile assembly has been restructured with three new namespaces to support this growth and provide room for future growth. The projections supported at 9.3 have been expended to include the majority, of those available to ArcGIS users, which have been packaged into a new dll for redistribution.

Geoprocessing tools for data and maps

To assist developers with preparing data and maps for their ArcGIS Mobile applications new tools have been created. By leveraging the ArcGIS Desktop ArcToolBox framework, we have build a Toolset with Mobile Tools that are easy to use and accessible from either ArcMAP or ArcCatalog. The Create BaseMap tool takes a vector datasets referenced in a Map document and outputs a highly compressed group of files (SDC) for use in Mobile applications. The Generate Mobile Service Cache is used to create a subset of data from a Mobile service that can be deployed to a Mobile device and is ready for use with ArcGIS Mobile applications. Given a defined extent, the Generate Mobile Service Cache tool extracts selected operational vector and basemap raster layers from a mobile data access enabled ArcGIS Server Map Service and generates a mobile service cache that can then be deployed to mobile devices.

System packaging and deployment

Part of the changes in 9.3 include the way in which the Mobile SDK is built and deployed. This will impact developers using the SDK to build an application or deployment package and the client installing the software. In 9.2, the Mobile SDK dlls were not placed in the DotNET GAC on the client system, which meant each application required a copy of the dll in the application folder. At 9.3, there is a ESRI.ArcGIS.Mobile.GAC file which must be deployed to the client device and allows multiple applications to use a single Mobile dll file, which only needs to be deployed once. This installation process is best done by using the AGSRuntime.cab file which is copied to your device or emulator and then run or unpacked. This process will install the runtime (a few dlls) and register them in the registry table. For additional information refer to the Deploying ArcGIS Mobile Applications topic.

Architecture changes

In ArcGIS Mobile 9.3, a new spatial engine is introduced. The engine supports both Windows and Windows CE operation system. The engine was ported over from ArcGIS and it was the same engine used to support ArcGIS spatial reference system. There are two files, one is for Windows and one is for Windows CE. The spatial reference engine for Windows can be found in \ArcGIS\Bin\ESRIMobilePE.dll while the spatial reference engine for Windows CE is located in \ArcGIS\DotNet\WindowsCE\ESRIMobilePE.dll. The library is a native dll. It is accessed through SpatialReference class.

Spatial reference changes

The SpatialReference namespace has undergone significant changes internally, while trying to minimize changes the classes exposed in the API. The biggest change to the spatial reference has been the creation of a new library which includes provides most of the spatial references from ArcGIS. This means that mobile users will be using the same projections as all other ArcGIS users. The spatial reference of the map is still based on what was published to the server. However, the Mobile system can now support maps that are served based on more than just the previous four projections. The new projection engine library supports virtually transformation from any coordinate system. However, only the transformation to and from a WGS84 coordinate system is exposed in the current 9.3 release.

What projections are supported?

Most projections such as Cylindrical, Conformal, Mercator and Stereographic are supported, e.g. lambert conformal conic, albers mercator, double stereographic, hotine oblique mercator.

What are not supported?

Grid based projection, e.g. New Zealand map grid.


9/20/2011