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


From a design perspective, ArcGIS Desktop isn't terribly complex. We'll spend a fair amount of time up front, preparing the map document. We'll add a floodplain layer to the map document file, create a grid index layer, enable data-driven pages, and prepare the layout view. After the map document has been prepared, we'll create a new Python add-in containing a button that will trigger the creation of the book map. The Python add-in will have a single button, which will contain an onClick() method. The onClick() method will append the individual map pages to a single output PDF file using the PDFDocument class in the arcpy.mapping module as shown in the following screenshot:

Let's get started and build the application.