Getting Tiles

The primary reason to establish a WMTS service is to serve tiles to others who use them in their own applications. Use the GetTile request to obtain tiles from a WMTS server. GetTile requests are always sent as HTTP strings and the response is a map image with well-defined geospatial and dimensional parameters in the image format specified in the request. For the Simple Profile, GetTile requests are supported for Popular Visualization CRS (Spherical or Popular Mercator) and WGS 84, in both cases with coordsys bounds.

If WMTS tile caching is enabled, the WMTS service will go to the cache for the tile upon receiving a GetTile request. If the cache does not have the tile then it generates the tile, saves it to the cache, and returns the tile to the client. For more information about enabling and configuring WMTS tile caching using Spectrum Spatial™ Manager, see WMTS Settings.

Note: For information about generating map tiles for the WMTS service in batches, see WMTS Tile Generator. You can also fill the cache using the WMTS Tile Generator.

Standard Request

This is an example of a GetTile standard request using Key Value Pair (KVP) encoding:

http://wmtsserver:port/rest/Spatial/WMTS?VERSION=1.0.0&SERVICE=WMTS&REQUEST=GetTile
&LAYER=World_WMTS_Layer&STYLE=default&FORMAT=image/png&TILEMATRIXSET=WorldWebMercatorQuad
&TILEMATRIX=1&TILEROW=1&TILECOL=1

This is a template of a GetTile standard request using RESTful encoding:

http://wmtsserver:port/rest/Spatial/WMTS/1.0.0/default/tiles/
{LAYER}/{STYLE}/{TILEMATRIXSET}/{TILEMATRIX}/{TILECOL}/{TILEROW}.{IMAGE_FORMAT_EXTENSION}

Note: The style parameter is not supported by Spectrum Spatial.

Simple Profile Request

The tile can be requested by using any of these URLs as formatted below.

Request for Popular Visualization CRS (Spherical or Popular Mercator) using RESTful encoding:

http://wmtsserver:port/rest/Spatial/WMTS/1.0.0/simpleProfileTile/tiles/
{LAYER}/{TILEMATRIX}/{TILECOL}/{TILEROW}.{IMAGE_FORMAT_EXTENSION}

Request for WGS 84 using RESTful encoding:

http://wmtsserver:port/rest/Spatial/WMTS/1.0.0/simpleProfileCRS84Tile/tiles/
{LAYER}/{TILEMATRIX}/{TILECOL}/{TILEROW}.{IMAGE_FORMAT_EXTENSION}

Note: The code above should all be on a single line with no breaks. Due to space limitations, we cannot display the request in such a way in this document.

Sample Response

After a successful GetTile request, the service returns a GetTile response that is an image of the map specified by the parameters in the request.