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 Import Records tool


In this first section, we'll build a Python Toolbox for the crime analysis tools that we'll create over the course of the next two chapters, and we'll create the Import Records tool. By now, you should be comfortable with the basic process of creating an ArcGIS Python Toolbox, so I will provide only a minimum set of instructions to create the toolbox. If needed, refer to the first chapter for the specifics of how to create an ArcGIS Python Toolbox.

The Import Records tool, which will be created in this section, will dynamically Import Records from an online, open records dataset provided by the city of Seattle, WA. This dataset will be accessed through the Socrata Open Data API using the Python requests module. For this tool, we'll include several parameters, including start and end dates to filter the records, a filter for the crime type, an output feature class where the records will be written, and an optional parameter to filter by police district. The...