Tips and best practices for globe caches
The information below may be helpful to you as you build and deploy globe caches.
Building caches for fast 2D and 3D consumption
ESRI globe clients can read 2D tiles faster than 3D tiles when the tiles are created in the ArcGIS Online/Bing Maps/Google Maps tiling scheme. The same is true for caches created in the WGS 84-based tiling scheme formerly used for ArcGIS Online. Globe caches should only be used when creating a 2D cache in one of these tiling schemes is not feasible.
Allowing your globe to switch to 2D mode in ArcGIS Explorer
ArcGIS Explorer (starting at build 900) has an optional 2D mode. If you've created a 3D globe service and you want ArcGIS Explorer users to be able to immediately switch to a corresponding 2D map service, you should make a map service of the same name available on your machine with "_2D" appended to the end of the name. For example, if you have a globe service named Tacoma, make a map service named Tacoma_2D if you want users to be able to switch from 3D to 2D view in ArcGIS Explorer.
Reusing globe cache directories previously built with ArcGlobe with a globe service based on the same globe document
If you already have a cache that you built using ArcGIS Desktop that you want to reuse with ArcGIS Server, do the following:
- Register the parent directory of the GlobeCache directory with ArcGIS Server as a server cache directory. For example, if you have your globe data cache residing in the location C:\mycache\deployment\GlobeCache , you'd register C:\mycache\deployment as a server cache directory.
- Modify the properties of the globe service to reference this server cache directory.
Note:If you do not have access to the parent directory of the GlobeCache directory, you can directly register your GlobeCache directory as a server cache directory and use it with your globe service. No additional GlobeCache subdirectory is created. If you use this workflow, you should make sure that this server cache directory is used exclusively for globe services.
Copying globe cache directories built using ArcGlobe to a globe cache directory on the server
You can also use the Globe Deployment Wizard from the ArcGlobe application to copy caches built using ArcGlobe Desktop to an ArcGIS Server GlobeCache directory. To read more about the wizard, see the topic Using the ArcGlobe Deployment Wizard in the ArcGIS Desktop Help.