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

Summary


In this chapter, you created a new ArcGIS Desktop Python toolbox containing two tools that are used to support importing and visualizing of the GPS data extracted from a collar attached to an elk in northern California. The first tool used the Python csv and ArcPy data access modules to read the GPS data from a csv file into a local feature class. After time enabling and creating the map document and the feature class which contains the GPS data that creates a second tool, this tool controls the visualization and mapping of the elk migration patterns for specific dates. This second tool used the ArcPy mapping module to accomplish these tasks.

In the next chapter, you will learn how to automate the production of map books using Data-driven pages and the ArcPy mapping module. In addition, you'll be introduced to the Python add-ins for ArcGIS Desktop. Python add-ins allow you to customize the ArcGIS Desktop interface.