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

Building the Create Map tool


This section details the construction of a Create Map tool, which will allow the end user to generate and export a map using a predefined layer file containing the symbology and a selected polygon feature class, which in turn will contain a count field (Join_Count) that was created with the Aggregate Crimes tool:

  1. If necessary, open C:\ArcGIS_Blueprint_Python\ch4\SeattleCrimes.mxd in ArcMap.

  2. Switch to the Layout view so that we can build the structure of the map that will be exported.

  3. Build the layout so that it appears similar to what is shown in the following screenshot:

  4. Double-click on the Title text element to display the properties.

  5. Click on the Size and Position tab and set Element Name to CrimeTitle, as shown in the following screenshot. Setting Element Name will enable us to access this element through a Python script that will dynamically set the name based on the user input.

  6. Save the map document.

  7. From the Catalog window, open the Python development environment...