Find hidden items created in Portal for ArcGIS while creating an Offline Area

Summary

Offline Map Areas in ArcGIS Enterprise

Creating an offline map area triggers two tasks in ArcGIS Server’s OfflinePackaging tool:

• CreateMapArea – Generates a map area item from a web map for a specified extent, linking them via a Map2Area relationship. A web map can have one map area per extent, with up to 16 offline areas across different extents.
• SetupMapArea – Packages all services within the map area extent. Produces tile packages (.tpk/.vtpk) for basemap layers and SQLite geodatabase packages for operational layers, linking them via an Area2Package relationship.

These pre-packaged areas enable faster, more efficient offline use.

Procedure

Managing Offline Map Area and Package Items in the ArcGIS Enterprise portal

• Within the ArcGIS Enterprise portal, each offline map area and associated map layer package is assigned a unique Item ID.
• You can view details for map areas, vector tile packages/tile packages, and SQLite geodatabases via the Portal for ArcGIS Sharing REST endpoint by navigating to:
  Portal Sharing REST Endpoint > User Content (from related resources) > Folder (containing the web map) and inspecting the relevant package items.

Important Considerations for Item and Folder Management in the ArcGIS Enterprise portal

If a web map and its associated layers are moved to another folder, the related offline map areas and packages remain in their original folder. Attempting to delete that original folder may result in a warning:

"There are items in this folder. Are you sure you want to delete them?"

Similarly, when deleting a user account that owns these items, you may encounter an error such as: 

"Unable to delete member: Member must not own items or groups".

In both scenarios, use the Portal Sharing REST endpoint to manually remove the associated items before proceeding with folder or user account deletion.

Alternative Method to Identify Hidden Items

• Hidden items may prevent deletion. To display them in the ArcGIS Portal interface, append showHiddenItems=true to the URL after content.html. For example:

https://<FQDN>/<Web_Adaptor_Instance>/home/content.html?showHiddenItems=true&view=table&sortOrder=desc&sortField=modified&folder=all&start=261&num=20#content

This allows the ArcGIS Enterprise portal to reveal hidden content, enabling manual deletion.