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

Design


Let's spend a little time going over the design of what we're going to build in this chapter. This application will be contained within an ArcGIS Python Toolbox called CrimeAnalysis.pyt. Inside the toolbox, three tools will be created, including ImportRecords, AggregateCrimes, and CreateMap. The ImportRecords tool will use the Python requests module to request crime data from the Seattle Police Department open database using the Socrata API. Crime data will be returned to the tool and then written to a local SeattleCrimes geodatabase using the arcpy.da module. The AggregateCrimes tool will use these imported point feature classes and aggregate them to polygon boundary layers, including census block groups, police precincts, and neighborhood boundaries. Finally, the CreateMap tool will allow the end user to select one of the boundary files that include aggregated crime data and automate the process of creating, exporting, and printing maps, as shown in the following screenshot:

Let...