ArcGIS Custom Printing Service for a Layout With More Than One Map Frame

Question

Recently we've been migrating our manual printing workflows to custom printing services at our ArcGIS Server instance. Everything was fun and games until we stumbled upon some Layouts with more than one Map Frame pointing to different Maps. After some googling I find out that the ExportWebMap specification doesn't cover Layouts with multiple Map Frames, forcing us to name the desired one as WEBMAP_MAP_FRAME. We are currently considering writing a more robust Printing Service that will generate its own Web_Map_as_JSON parameters internally resulting in multiple PNGs for each Map Frame and later on binding it all together in a final PDF down the pipeline but... it seems VERY janky!

TL;DR: Is it possible to create a custom printing service for ArcGIS Server to print a Layout with more than one Map Frame pointing to different Map Services?

We are using ArcGIS Pro 2.7.3 and our Enterprise instances are running 10.7.1 and 10.8.1.

Answer 1

You've discovered most, if not all of the pieces you can and cannot do.

Can you make a new layout template with multiple map frames? Yes

Can you include this layout when creating a new, custom print layout? Yes

Can you have the default apps hook in and update something other than the main mapframe? No - as you point out in the ExportWebMap spec.

You'd essentially need to create a custom service and a custom client. The client would need to send a specific request with what URLs and what MapFrames, where the server (ie the custom GP Print service) would take that and generate the output.

What you want to do is add to the out of the box print service. But you need to do something closer to creating custom parameters/custom service.