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Community Map of Canada offline in your pocket (part 3: ArcGIS Pro)

Published Date
Author Alia Kotb

Less than 10 steps to take your Community Map of Canada offline in ArcGIS Pro

You enjoy using the online version of the Community Map of Canada. You’ve heard that it is now available offline for your different ArcGIS environments. You may have even read part 1 (ArcGIS Online) and part 2 (ArcGIS Enterprise) of this trilogy. Follow these less than 10 steps that outline how you can use the Community Map of Canada offline in ArcGIS Pro.

Benefits

Before we get into the nitty-gritty details of offline access, let’s do a quick recap of what makes the Community Map of Canada great to use:

  • Data comes from authoritative sources – 350 and counting
  • Update frequency:
    • Online basemap – updates collected each day, and an updated version of the map is published twice a week
    • Offline basemap – updates collected each day, and an updated version of the map is published once a month
  • It’s free

You can use the offline basemap in the following applications:

  1. ArcGIS Field Maps
  2. ArcGIS Collector
  3. ArcGIS Survey123
  4. Basemap Gallery
  5. ArcGIS Explorer
  6. ArcGIS Workforce

Taking your Community Map of Canada offline in ArcGIS Pro

  1. Open a new ArcGIS Pro project and remove the default World Topographic and World Hillshade basemaps.  Right click on each basemap from the ‘Contents’ pane on the left and choose Remove.
  2. Next, navigate to the ‘Catalog’ pane on the right, click ‘Portal’, and click on the ‘Living Atlas’ icon.

                       Screen capture showing where the Living atlas icon is on the Portal tab of the Catalog pane   

  1. In the ‘Search Living Atlas’ box, type ‘cmocoffline’.  In the search results, right-click on ‘CMOCOffline’ and select ‘Add to Current Map’.

Screen capture adding the CMOCOffline tile layer from the Living atlas search results to a new map in ArcGIS Pro.

  1. You will see that the tile layer has been added to the ‘Contents’ pane on the left.

Screen capture showing what the offline tile layer looks like when visibility is turned on in the contents pane.

  1. Make sure the layers visibility is toggled on and navigate to the desired area to be taken offline.
  2. From the ‘Map’ ribbon, navigate to the ‘Offline’ tool group and click ‘Download Map’ to create a vector tile package of the visible map.

                                                                 Screen capture showing the Download Map tool from the offline tool group.

  1. With ‘Include basemap & tile layers’ checked, choose the max scale for vector tile layers.  Tile layers have a maximum number of tiles that can be taken offline, selecting the max scale will show the most detail at that scale range.

                                    Screen capture showing the tool dialogue for the Download Map tool, with Include basemap & tile layers checked on and a max scale factor for vector tile layers selected.

  1. Click ‘Download’ when the process is complete. The vector tile package containing the vector tiles will be added to the map and will also appear in the ArcGIS Pro project's home folder.  Make sure to save your project.
  2. Now you can connect your device to the computer and copy the new vector tile layer to the appropriate folder on your device.

If you’d rather watch the video than follow written instructions my colleague Tyler Scuralli made a wickedly awesome video of these steps, check it out here.

Have I managed to spark your curiosity to learn more? Here’s a page I love, Accessing the Community Map of Canada. If you have questions or are interested in the program, let’s chat akotb@esri.ca or find me on LinkedIN.

This post was translated to French and can be viewed here.