Book Image

ArcGIS Blueprints

By : Donald Eric Pimpler, Eric Pimpler
Book Image

ArcGIS Blueprints

By: Donald Eric Pimpler, Eric Pimpler

Overview of this book

This book is an immersive guide to take your ArcGIS Desktop application development skills to the next level It starts off by providing detailed description and examples of how to create ArcGIS Desktop Python toolboxes that will serve as containers for many of the applications that you will build. We provide several practical projects that involve building a local area/community map and extracting wildfire data. You will then learn how to build tools that can access data from ArcGIS Server using the ArcGIS REST API. Furthermore, we deal with the integration of additional open source Python libraries into your applications, which will help you chart and graph advanced GUI development; read and write JSON, CSV, and XML format data sources; write outputs to Google Earth Pro, and more. Along the way, you will be introduced to advanced ArcPy Mapping and ArcPy Data Access module techniques and use data-driven Pages to automate the creation of map books. Finally, you will learn advanced techniques to work with video and social media feeds. By the end of the book, you will have your own desktop application without having spent too much time learning sophisticated theory.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
ArcGIS Blueprints
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 2. Tracking Elk Migration Patterns with GPS and ArcPy

In this chapter, we're going to build an application that imports a CSV file containing Global Positioning System (GPS) locations that depict elk migration patterns into a feature class that will be time-enabled to display migration patterns over time and space. We'll use the ArcPy data access (arcpy.da) module and the Python csv module to read the file containing GPS locations, and write the data to a new feature class. Next, we'll use the ArcPy mapping (archy.mapping) module to make the output feature class time-enabled, and then visualize the migration patterns of the elk over time and space. The application will be built as an ArcGIS Python Toolbox in much the same way as what we did in Chapter 1, Extracting Wildfire Data from an ArcGIS Server Map Service with the ArcGIS REST API.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • ArcGIS Desktop Python toolboxes

  • Reading CSV files with the Python csv module

  • Inserting data in...