New gazetteers available in our Online Services

All users of our online services will shortly have three new gazetteers added to their accounts. These are ArcGIS Locators for OS Code-Point Open, OS Locator and 1:50k Placename gazetteers. Details about these data formats can be found here (CodePoint Open), here (OS Locator) and here (1:50k Placename).

The new locators are named

• OS CodePointOpen Postcode Locator
• OS Locator Locator
• OS 50K Placename Locator

Details of how to use all our online gazetteers across the Esri platform can be found in the ‘How to Use Guide’, which has recently been updated. There are also some Tips and Tricks on how to get the best out of these new ArcGIS Locators, and these can be found here (CodePoint Open), here (OS Locator) and here (1:50k Placename).

The eagle-eyed amongst you may have spotted that we already have some existing gazetteers for CodePoint Open and OS Locator, and you may be wondering what the difference is. The current Locators, called

• Ordnance Survey CodePoint Open
• Ordnance Survey Locator

are based on LocatorHub. The new Locators are ArcGIS Locators.  The main difference you will experience in using both types of gazetteers is that the LocatorHub based gazetteers require the Online Services Add In be installed before you can use these gazetteers, while the ArcGIS Locators can be used seamlessly within the Esri  platform.

Note: If you use LocalView Fusion, please read this blog for more information.

OpenSSL 'Heartbleed' vulnerability

ESRI UK’s premium and free map services are not affected by the OpenSSL 'Heartbleed' vulnerability (CVE-2014-0160).  OpenSSL is not used in the components we use for terminating SSL connections at datahub.esriuk.com.

Esri UK Online Data Services – Upgrade to ArcGIS 10.2.1

We are planning to upgrade the Esri UK Online Data Services from ArcGIS 10 to 10.2.1 on 7th April 2014.

One important change at ArcGIS Server 10.2 and above is that the service URLs are now case sensitive.  We have therefore taken the decision to make all of our service names lower case only.  The service types will remain mixed case.

To minimise the impact on our users we have put in place URL re-direction so that for a period of time URLs in the previous mixed case format will continue to work, however, we recommend that for optimum performance you update your MXDs, LocalView Fusion content and other references to Esri UK Online Data Services to be in lower case.

Examples of the change to the URLs for the OS Open Background service:

Old:

datahub.esriuk.com/ArcGIS/rest/services/GB_Basemap/OS_Open_Background/MapServer

New:

datahub.esriuk.com/arcgis/rest/services/gb_basemap/os_open_background/MapServer

Update on 2014-04-09 14:51 by Valerie Hindson

Known Issue with Free Census Services

Please be aware that in some circumstances the URL redirection that has been put in place to cope with the changes in case of service names is not working for the fifteen free Census Services.

If you are unable to connect to the census services following this upgrade then please check that you are using all lower case urls.

For example, if you added the Census data (or other data) to an MXD in ArcGIS Desktop using the Services Add-In and you are no longer able to connect to the service - then you should remove the layer from the MXD and re-add it. 

Update on 2014-04-07 18:01 by Valerie Hindson

We have successfully upgraded our Online Data Services from ArcGIS Server 10.0 to 10.2.1 today.

Update on 2014-04-09 14:06 by Valerie Hindson

Esri UK Online Services - Token Issue.

The recent update to our Esri UK online map services, has resulted in a number of our users seeing issues with Long Lived tokens that had been previously generated to enable the services to be used with our web API’s.

The error manifests itself as an “Invalid Token Request” error.  If you are affected by the issue, the solution is to regenerate the Long-Lived Token using the token generation page, in exactly the same way as the original token was generated.  The new token should be used instead of your existing token.

Up until April 9th at 3pm, Long Lived tokens were set to expire after 24 hours regardless of the length requested. This has now been corrected. If you have created a new token prior to the time above, you will need to create another new token, and this should now behave as expected. Apologies for the disruption to your services.

Update on 2014-04-10 15:57 by Valerie Hindson

Known Issue with IP based tokens

Please be aware that to create IP based tokens you currently need to ensure that your URL is correctly cased.

If the URL is incorrectly cased the token created is not valid and you will get an invalid token error when you attempt to use it.

We are currently working on a fix for this issue.

Ref: 46147

Changes to Esri UK Online Content Services

We have recently add some some new services to our online data services.

For more information please see the post on our sister geoxchange blog which can be found here

DNS Changes to http://datahub.esriuk.com

This is one of our helpers....

We are planning to switch our domain name from its current load balancer to a new load balancer. This will change the IP address of the domain name. This is part of an on-going programme to further improve the service. The switch is expected to happen in the week of August 19th. 

Nothing else will change – all map services will remain the same.

We do not anticipate any disruption apart from very short-lived updates to connectivity as local DNS caches refresh themselves.

If any client experiences persistent problems, please contact Esri UK Support in the first instance.