Cam,
Here are some quick responses to your questions. Additionally; we are working on building a user experience around these features in online to make it easier to create and manage areas over the next few releases to simplify this workflow.
Q1: These APIs currently work against ArcGIS Online, not yet against Portal for ArcGIS Enterprise. Correct?
This one requires a bit more context. These tools will start showing up in Enterprise in 10.6.1 and if you want to use enterprise feature services (hosted or non-hosted) they will need to be 10.6.1 to work properly.
The packaging tools whether they're within Online or Enterprise do support packaging external services. For example if you had a web map in ArcGIS Online and it had a tiled map service (basemap) that was on Enterprise you could still package that as part of your online map. The caveat in that case is the service in enterprise needs to be public, or if it secured when you added it as an item to online you would need to store the portal credentials with it.
Q2: I'm struggling to understand the differences between Setup Map Area and Create Map Area. Can you explain?
Think of the process as a two steps just to give some extra flexibility depending on your workflow. The first one Create Map Area , creates the Map Area item based on the extent/bookmark you want to use, at this point nothing gets packaged. Your simply defining the geographic area.
Setup Map Area does all the packaging and heavy lifting. At this point you can use the the defaults to make a map area or pass in additional parameters as needed for each layer (change sync settings, define base map detail, ignore layers etc.)
Q3: Is there an intended flow where all three of these APIs are to be used together? e.g. Setup > Create > Refresh?
The basic order is Create > Setup > Refresh (if required)
Refresh Map Area Packages is used to keep the packaged data up to date as the underlying data in the map changes. Think of it mostly as preventing the initial download from being too stale. For most apps a typical pattern would be to:
- Download the map area
- Register your replicas against the feature service
- Sync those feature services to get any changes that might have happened while downloading or since the package was last refreshed
- Start working with the map
One feature we are looking to add is the be able to schedule automatic refreshing of the packages.