Secured and subscriber content

Once assembled, a dashboard is shared with its intended audience. It can be shared publicly with everyone or with only people within your organization. In this context, there are some data source considerations to be made when it comes to secured or subscriber content.

Secured content

Dashboards can include data from ArcGIS Server web services. These services may or may not have been secured. When secured, the dashboard will prompt the user for credentials when the service is being accessed. This prompt can be avoided if the shared secure service has had credentials stored. In this case, the service item will proxy requests to the service using the stored credentials.

Tip:

You can use the technique of proxying service requests to enable access to subscriber content as an alternative workflow to the one described below. In the case of premium subscriber content, consider limiting the usage of the shared service items by rate limiting or by designating specific referrer URLs or IP addresses that can access the service.

Subscriber content

Dashboards can include data from the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World (a curated subset of ArcGIS Online items maintained by Esri and the ArcGIS community). Much of the content found in the ArcGIS Living Atlas is available to the public with no restrictions. Other content, however, is not available publicly, and requires a subscription to an ArcGIS organization. This is referred to as subscriber content.

There are two variations of subscriber content:

• Subscriber content is the collection of layers published by Esri that requires an organizational subscription account to access. Subscriber content does not consume credits.
• Premium content is a subtype of the subscriber content. Like subscriber content, premium content requires an organizational subscription account to access. The difference is that premium content consumes credits.

When a dashboard referencing subscriber content has been shared, the user experience can be affected. Organizational members will enjoy seamless access to the content. Because they are authenticated by their organization when accessing the dashboard, their account is used to access the content.

The same cannot be said for dashboards accessed anonymously (by members of the public, for example). Because they are not authenticated, users will be prompted to enter credentials that they don't have.

As the dashboard's author, you can grant access to subscriber content using your account. When you configure the dashboard, click the Options button on the navigation bar and click Subscriber Content. On the dialog box that appears, enable all the content you want to grant access to. Content flagged as premium will consume subscription credits. Optionally limit the usage of subscriber content by specifying the maximum number of requests allowed for a specific time interval. When all subscriber content has been enabled in a dashboard, anonymous users will no longer be prompted for credentials.