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

Creating the Grid Index Features


A grid index feature class can be used to set the map extent for each map in the series. We can use the Grid Index Features geoprocessing tool to create this layer, the following steps will guide you through, how to create Grid Index Features:

  1. Using the selection tools in ArcMap, select the Lower Colorado region from the Planning Districts layer, as shown in the following screenshot. We're going to create an index grid for this region. The process will be as, though. if you decide to select other regions of the map:

  2. Open the Grid Index Features geoprocessing tool found in the Data Driven Pages toolset in the Cartography Tools toolbox.

  3. Define the parameters seen in the following screenshot:

  4. Click on OK to generate the grid index layer. It should look similar to what is shown in the following screenshot. Note that I have altered the zymology for the layer to only include an outline with no fill for the index polygons and have zoomed in on the map:

  5. We have some additional...