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 Sector tool


Efficient search and rescue operations will require that groups of personnel be assigned to specific areas. In this section, we'll create a tool that will allow Search and Rescue analysts to sketch polygon features that represent specific areas that will then be assigned to search groups. The following steps will help you to create Search Sector tool:

  1. Close ArcMap if required.

  2. In Windows Explorer, return to the working directory that stores the Python add-in for this project and open the addin_addin.py file from the Install folder in your Python development environment.

  3. Find the SearchSector class and remove all the methods with the exception of the __init__ and onLine() methods.

  4. In the __init__ method, set the self.shape property to LINE, as shown here, along with a cursor type:

    self.shape = "LINE"
    self.cursor = 3
  5. In the onLine() method, set the workspace environment variable:

    def onLine(self, line_geometry):
          arcpy.env.workspace = "C:\ArcGIS_Blueprint_Python...