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

Design


Before we start building the application, we'll spend some time planning what we'll build. This is a fairly simple application, but it serves to illustrate how ArcGIS Desktop and ArcGIS Server can be easily integrated using the ArcGIS REST API. In this application, we'll build an ArcGIS Python Toolbox that serves as a container for a single tool called USGSDownload. The USGSDownload tool will use the Python requests, JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), and ArcPy da modules to request real-time wildfire data from a USGS map service. The response from the map service will contain information including the location of the fire, the name of the fire, and some additional information that will then be written to a local geodatabase.

The communication between the ArcGIS Desktop Python Toolbox and the ArcGIS Server map service will be accomplished through the ArcGIS REST API and the Python language.

Let's get started and build the application.