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

Chapter 6. Viewing and Querying Parcel Data

One of the primary limitations of working with Python in ArcGIS Desktop has been the lack of tools for the development of Graphical User Interfaces (GUI). Previous chapters in this book covered the use of custom ArcGIS script tools as well as Python add-ins to capture user input, but both of these options are limited. The core Python library includes Tkinter for user interface development, but it doesn't provide a modern look and can be difficult to work with. This chapter will cover the use of wxPython to build advanced user interfaces for ArcGIS Desktop.

wxPython is a GUI toolkit for Python that enables the creation of advanced user interfaces. This library is a Python extension module (native code), that wraps the wxWidgets cross-platform GUI library written in C++. This chapter uses the wxPython library in combination with an ArcGIS Desktop add-in written in Python to capture the user input to query and view parcel data.

In this chapter, we...