Moving a compiled image service definition

There may be cases when you need to move the data you used to create an image service definition. For example, you may have created it using data stored on a detachable drive and you need to move it, so the path location will not be the same. Or, you need to move the compiled image service definition (.ISCDef) file to a different location or computer and you will still have access to the location of the raster datasets, but the path has changed. Although the location of the raster process definition contains many files in the .ISCDef folder, there are three components you have to consider when moving the contents of a compiled image service definition:

• The .ISCDef that contains the shapefiles and raster process definitions
• The raster datasets
• Any optimized raster datasets that you have created

The .ISCDef contains absolute paths to the rasters; however, you can create a text file to redefine those paths. To do this, create a text file in the location of the .ISCDef with the same name as the .ISCDef and having the extension .ISPaths. This file should contain search and replace strings, with one per line, and each replace string should be delimited with a pipe. Do not use a delimiter to separate the lines, because it will be taken as part of the path to be replaced. For example, if you had a service called MyService.ISCDef and it contained paths to d:\image and f:\QB, but on a different computer, these had been moved to q:\sample\image and w:\, you would need to create the text file, MyService.ISPaths, that contains the following:

d:\image\|q:\sample\image\

f:\QB\|w:\

In the case where you move the image data to a remote machine, you need to specify the Uniform Naming Convention (UNC) path of the image data location on the remote machine. For example, the MyService.ISCDef compiled image service definition refers to image data in d:\ImageServer; however, the data has been moved to g:\ImageData on a remote machine named Metro. For the MyService.ISCDef to refer to the image data correctly, you need to create a text file called MyService.ISPaths. This .ISPaths file should be in the same location as the compiled image service definition and should contain the following line:

d:\ImageServer\|\\Metro\g:\ImageData\

When the data is on a different machine than the .ISCDef, you need to be sure the remote machine (for example, \\Metro) is accessible. It is important to use UNC paths rather than the mapped drives of a local user's account, since the service provider is running as a service in the administrator account. You also need to ensure that the UNC paths are accessible to the administrator with the administrator password. To ensure that the mapped drives are accessible to the local user, you can change the administrator account in which the service provider is running to a local user account using the Services option in the Administrative Tools under Control Panel in the Windows operating system.

If you only move the *.ISCDef to a location on the same machine it was created on, you will not need the *.ISPaths file, because the path to the source data and derived images has not changed.

If you have edit access to the image service definition, you can permanently change the paths to the data using the Edit Raster Properties Wizard.