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

Creating the Locator Map


The Locator Map provide an overview of the spatial location of the current map within the context of a large geographic area. They provide an overview of the location of the current map in the series. In this section, you'll create a Locator Map for the layout view. We'll use a feature class copied from the grid index layer and edited to create a mask layer and a current page layer. The mask layer is used to gray out the features that are not in the current map while the current page layer highlights the current map:

  1. In ArcMap, create a new data frame and name it Locator Map.

  2. Copy the Basemap, Floodplains, and GridIndexFeatures layers from the Detail Map and paste them into the Locator Map. Rename the GridIndexFeatures layer to Page Labels.

  3. Right-click on the Page Labels feature class and navigate to Data | Export Data. Save it to the same location as the grid index features and name it LocatorMask. Add the layer to the map. Your ArcMap table of contents should now...