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Hi Neil,

I think your best bet is to host them on AGOL or with your own web hosting.  I'm not familiar with any restrictions on the number of files in a folder in AGOL but I can ask around the office tomorrow.

However, I think your idea for private web hosting might be the fastest/easiest.  You can spin up a VM somewhere like DigitalOcean or pretty much any Amazon instance.  I'm quite happy with DigitalOcean.  It costs me $7/mo and you can get $25 credit for recommendations (both people get the credit).  I had web hosting up and running in ~5 minutes.  This includes configuring SFTP transfer with FileZilla.  You could give them consistent names, SFTP them into a directory, and field calculate the link column really quickly.  I think this solution might take about an hour to stand up, beginning to end.

Otherwise, I think Google Drive would work fine.  I've done it before but I think you'd spend more time configuring it than other options.

Hope that helps,
Chris Martin


On Wed, Jul 15, 2015 at 6:49 PM, Neil Curri <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Hello,

I'm investigating where I could host thousands of PDFs, each of which will be associated with a specific feature in a hosted feature layer on ArcGIS Online. The URL will be an attribute in the feature layer, and made available as a simple link in the pop-up for each feature to the file. 

I initially looked at Dropbox, but scrapped it because there doesn't seem to be a way to get direct links to all the files in the public folder en masse to populate into an attribute column -- it appears that it must be done individually through the GUI.

Next, I've been looking into Google Drive. You can get a direct link to all your files via the folderID, which appears to be static (https ://googledrive.com/host/<folderID>/<filename>). I tested this out with a handful of PDF files, and it worked. So, that's possible. But I'm concerned that the folderID isn't a really a static thing (as in permanent), or that there's a quota to the number of files that can be linked to this folderID (something I think Esri does on ArcGIS Online if you store your linked files there). I'm not sure if that's really a concern, so if anyone's aware I'd appreciate it. 

Searching around for alternatives, I came across another solution, also using Google Drive. You use a link to the root folder (the webViewLink) to publish the shared folder's contents, then apparently you can use a simplified URL to link to the files in the folder. It's described in the Google apps developer blog here, though I haven't yet tried it nor do I know where exactly to start, but I did get as far as being able to retrieve the webViewLink from the shared folder. Would anyone recommend this method over the previous, simpler method? 

Another option would be to store the linked files on a private web hosting site for the chum change it costs nowadays for a basic account. Although there are a lot of files to store, it's not a lot of data. I don't even need DNS. 

If you've found success with any of these or other options or would recommend one over another, I'd be interested to know. 

Neil Curri
GIS Analyst, PVE Sheffler
Vassar College Academic Computing Consultant
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