Map Tiles For Offline Usage Using ArcGIS API for Flex

So… Google introduced an offline feature to their mobile mapping application, enabling you to view map tiles when you are disconnected from the network. This is pretty neat and very useful now that local storage is so “abundant” on mobile devices. In this post, I would like to show you how to use the mobile device local storage for offline tile retrieval using the ArcGIS API for Flex. When we built the API, we always had the vision of extensibility to enable people to do things that we did not think about. One of then was to enable the control of the URL from where the tiles will be retrieved. A while back, I did such an implementation using Amazon S3. So, I rehashed that code using Adobe AIR File capabilities. The demo application that I am featuring here operates in two modes; an online mode and an offline mode. In the online mode, I keep a set all downloaded tiles for a particular viewing session. Before I go offline, I download the map server metadata and all the visited tiles to my device local storage. The AIR runtime can notify an application when the network connectivity changes. This enables me to put the application in offline mode and when I start panning and zooming, rather than retrieving the tiles from the cloud, I retrieve the tiles from my local storage. Pretty neat, eh ? So here is the code:

public class OfflineTiledMapServiceLayer extends ArcGISTiledMapServiceLayer
{
  override protected function getTileURL(
     level:Number,
     row:Number,
     col:Number
  ):URLRequest
  {
    var urlRequest:URLRequest;

    if (Model.instance.isOffline)
    {
      urlRequest = new URLRequest(
        "app-storage:/l" + level + "r" + row + "c" + col);
    }
    else
    {
      urlRequest = super.getTileURL(level, row, col);
      if (urlRequest.url in Model.instance.cacheItemDict === false)
      {
        const item:CacheItem = new CacheItem();
        item.urlRequest = urlRequest;
        item.level = level;
        item.row = row;
        item.col = col;
        Model.instance.cacheItemDict[urlRequest.url] = item;
      }
   }

   return urlRequest;
 }
}

The OfflineTiledMapServiceLayer extends the ArcGISTiledMapServiceLayer class and overrides the getTileURL function. This function is invoked to get the tile URL for a particular map level, row and column. If the application mode is offline, then the “app-storage” url scheme is used and the path is in the form of “l”+level+”r”+row+”c”+column. If the application mode is online, then the super.getTileURL is invoked and we keep a set of visited URLs. Using the application settings view, the application has the option to download the map server metadata and iterate over the visited tiles and save the bitmap images to the local storage as defined by File.applicationStorageDirectory. The AIR runtime has the capability to notify the application of a network change. When this occurs, I ping a URL (www.google.com) using the HTTPService to determine if this is a connect or a disconnect change thus putting the application in an online or offline state.
The application can be written in such a way that any visited tile can automatically be saved to the local storage, I leave that as an exercise for the reader :-)
Like usual, all the source code is available here.
NOTE: This sample application is for demonstration purposes ONLY and is intended to be used with your own legally cacheable tiles - I am not a lawyer, but I am pretty sure that it is not legal to save locally the ArcGIS.com accessible tiles.