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

Summary


Integrating ArcGIS Desktop and ArcGIS Server is easily accomplished using the ArcGIS REST API and the Python programming language. In this chapter, we created an ArcGIS Python Toolbox containing a tool that connects to an ArcGIS Server map service containing real-time wildfire information and hosted by the USGS. The connection was accomplished through the use of the Python request module that we used in order to submit a request and handle the response. Finally, we used the ArcPy data access module to write this information to a local geodatabase.

In the next chapter, we'll continue working with ArcGIS Python toolboxes, and you'll also learn how to read CSV files with the Python CSV module, insert data into a feature class, and use the arcpy.mapping module to work with time-enabled data.