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 Search Area Buffers tool


The search and rescue operations team can benefit from the knowledge of the potential search radius in which they'll need to operate. To assist with this task, the next tool that will be added to the SAR toolbox will be a Search Area Buffers tool that calculates multiple buffers based on the LKP template created in the previous step. This tool will be a variant of the existing Multi-Ring Buffer tool provided by ArcGIS Desktop. The tool will be simplified to include only distances in miles.

The following steps will help you to create the Search Area Buffers tool:

  1. In ArcMap, right-click on the SAR.pyt custom toolbox in the Catalog view and select Edit to open the code in the Python development environment.

  2. Copy and paste the existing AssignLKPAttributes class inside the SAR.pyt file.

  3. Rename the newly pasted AssignLKPAttributes class to SearchAreaBuffers class.

  4. Update the self.label and self.description properties, as shown in the following code:

    class SearchAreaBuffers...