Book Image

Python Geospatial Development - Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Erik Westra
Book Image

Python Geospatial Development - Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Erik Westra

Overview of this book

Geospatial development links your data to places on the Earth's surface. Writing geospatial programs involves tasks such as grouping data by location, storing and analyzing large amounts of spatial information, performing complex geospatial calculations, and drawing colorful interactive maps. In order to do this well, you'll need appropriate tools and techniques, as well as a thorough understanding of geospatial concepts such as map projections, datums and coordinate systems. Python Geospatial Development - Second Edition teaches you everything you need to know about writing geospatial applications using Python. No prior knowledge of geospatial concepts, tools or techniques is required. The book guides you through the process of installing and using various toolkits, obtaining geospatial data for use in your programs, and building complete and sophisticated geospatial applications in Python. Python Geospatial Development teaches you everything you need to know about writing geospatial applications using Python. No prior knowledge of geospatial concepts, tools or techniques is required. The book guides you through the process of installing and using various toolkits, obtaining geospatial data for use in your programs, and building complete and sophisticated geospatial applications in Python. This book provides an overview of the major geospatial concepts, data sources and toolkits. It teaches you how to store and access spatial data using Python, how to perform a range of spatial calculations, and how to store spatial data in a database. Because maps are such an important aspect of geospatial programming, the book teaches you how to build your own “slippy map” interface within a web application, and finishes with the detailed construction of a geospatial data editor using Geodjango. Whether you want to write quick utilities to solve spatial problems, or develop sophisticated web applications based around maps and geospatial data, this book includes everything you need to know.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Python Geospatial Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Implementing the "list shapefiles" view


When the user first opens the ShapeEditor application, we want them to see a list of the previously-uploaded shapefiles, with "import", "edit", "export", and "delete" options. Let's build this list view, which acts as the starting point for the entire ShapeEditor application.

This view is going to be part of the "editor" application, so we first need to create this application within our Django project. To do this, cd into the shapeEditor project directory and type the following:

python manage.py startapp editor

As usual, Django places the application in the top-level directory, making it a reusable application. We need to move it into our shapeEditor directory so that it becomes specific to our project. Either move the directory manually, or use the following terminal command:

mv editor shapeEditor

We now need to add our new application to the project. Edit the settings.py module, and add the following line to the end of the INSTALLED_APPS list:

    'shapeEditor...