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

Setting up the Data Frame


The ArcGIS Desktop provides the ability to efficiently create a map book through a combination of the Data Driven Pages functionality along with an arcpy.mapping script. With a single map document file, you can use the Data Driven Pages toolbar to create a series of maps using the layout view along with your operational data and an index layer.

The index layer contains features that will be used to define the extent of each map in the series. It divides the map into sections, with each section representing a map that will be generated. These sections are sometimes called tiles or areas of interest, and they are often rectangular or square shapes.

If you need to include additional pages in the map book, including a title page, an overview map, and other ancillary pages, you'll need to combine the output from the Data Driven Pages toolbar with the functionality provided by the arcpy.mapping module.

In the following steps, we will learn how to use the Data Driven Pages...