Book Image

Building Web and Mobile ArcGIS Server Applications with JavaScript ??? Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Eric Pimpler, Mark Lewin
Book Image

Building Web and Mobile ArcGIS Server Applications with JavaScript ??? Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Eric Pimpler, Mark Lewin

Overview of this book

The ArcGIS API for JavaScript enables you to quickly build web and mobile mapping applications that include sophisticated GIS capabilities, yet are easy and intuitive for the user. Aimed at both new and experienced web developers, this practical guide gives you everything you need to get started with the API. After a brief introduction to HTML/CSS/JavaScript, you'll embed maps in a web page, add the tiled, dynamic, and streaming data layers that your users will interact with, and mark up the map with graphics. You will learn how to quickly incorporate a broad range of useful user interface elements and GIS functionality to your application with minimal effort using prebuilt widgets. As the book progresses, you will discover and use the task framework to query layers with spatial and attribute criteria, search for and identify features on the map, geocode addresses, perform network analysis and routing, and add custom geoprocessing operations. Along the way, we cover exciting new features such as the client-side geometry engine, learn how to integrate content from ArcGIS.com, and use your new skills to build mobile web mapping applications. We conclude with a look at version 4 of the ArcGIS API for JavaScript (which is being developed in parallel with version 3.x) and what it means for you as a developer.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Chapter 10. Geoprocessing Tasks

Geoprocessing is the act of manipulating geographic and related data. Esri's ArcGIS Desktop software provides a large number of geoprocessing tools that you can chain together into models to accomplish specific workflows, like the one you see in the following diagram. For example, you might create a model that buffers one layer and then clips a second layer to it. You could use the model with a stream layer for the buffer and a vegetation layer for the clip. But, having created this model once, you can use it to perform the same operations on other layers without having to recreate it from scratch. You could also automate it as part of a batch-processing operation.

But where things get interesting from our perspective as ArcGIS API for JavaScript developers, is the ability to publish these geoprocessing tools as services in ArcGIS Server and consume them within our web mapping applications.

Think about that for a moment. That means we can create just about any...