Introduction

Here is a quick sample demonstrating the use of a Class Breaks Renderer in the ESRI ArcGIS iPhone API. The sample queries an ArcGIS Server Map Service for cities in California and renders them as graphics based on the population. Here’s a screenshot of the app running in the simulator.

Click here to download the source code from this article.

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Introduction

Last week I started to familiarize myself with the ESRI ArcGIS iPhone API public beta and I blogged about my First Impressions. This week I had a chance to play around with it some more and I decided to investigate working with location. I enhanced my sample application from last week to include a Location button, which when pressed zooms the map to the current location and displays a custom push pin graphic.

Click here to download the source code from this article.

There are two ways you can work with location while writing an app with ESRI’s iPhone API:

• Work directly with Apple’s Core Location framework
• Use ESRI AGSGPS class (Direct Link or Reference Index)

ESRI’s AGSGPS class provides a convenient wrapper around Core Location if you don’t want (or need) to delve into the details of the framework.

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The ESRI ArcGIS iPhone API was released to public beta today. Jeff Shaner blogged and tweeted about it this morning.

I downloaded the SDK this afternoon and took it for a spin. My first impressions are very favorable. Although the documentation is still a bit sparse in a few places, that’s to be expected for a first beta.

The SDK is another client API for consuming ArcGIS Server REST endpoints, and it works with versions 9.3.1 and 10.0. If you have worked with any of the other client APIs, you will already be familiar with the basic paradigm of interaction with the various REST services offered by ArcGIS Server.

The SDK Concepts Documentation provides a basic overview of the technology and includes a number of brief walkthroughs as well as short code samples illustrating how to perform common programming tasks with the API.

The installation also includes six sample applications which are installed into your ~/Library/SDKs/Samples folder. Studying these sample apps is a good way to jumpstart your familiarity with the API.

But enough talk already, let’s see some code! More...

Overview

This is the third post in a series where I discuss techniques for interacting with the ArcGIS Server REST API from within a Flex 3 application built with the Google Maps API for Flash. The first and second posts presented and refined an example that demonstrated how to stream features from ArcGIS Server and overlay them on top of Google Maps data. This post demonstrates how to display an ArcGIS Server cached tile layer as a custom map type with the Google Maps API for Flash.

Sample Application Concepts

The sample application works as follows:

• The Google Maps API for Flash is embedded in a Flex 3 application.
• A cached tile layer representing Land Base features for Portland, Oregon is served via an ArcGIS Server Map Service, accessible via ArcGIS Server’s REST API.
• The cached tile layer appears as a custom map type in the Google Maps API for Flash User Interface.
• The cached tile layer is displayed at zoom levels 0 - 19.

Here are a couple of screen shots of the sample application. The first shows the application with the custom “Land Base” map type selected. The second shows the application with the normal map type selected.

Live example is here, and source code is here. More...

Overview

When working with the Find Address Task in the ArcGIS Server WebADF, the default zoom scale that is displayed when the user zooms to a found address might not be what you want. This article discusses how to change it using the ZoomToPointFactor property. More...

Overview

This is the second post in a series where I discuss techniques for interacting with the ArcGIS Server REST API from within a Flex 3 application built with the Google Maps API for Flash. If you haven’t read the first post yet, I encourage you to do so now.

The first post presented a simple example that demonstrated how to stream features from ArcGIS Server and overlay them on top of Google Maps data. In this second post, we will reorganize the code for better reusability and add some geocoding functionality.

I’ll keep this post pretty brief and only cover the major points. Feel free to check out the live example and dive into the source code! More...

Overview

This is the first post in a series where I will discuss techniques for interacting with the ArcGIS Server REST API from within a Flex 3 application built with the Google Maps API for Flash.

With this post, we start with a simple example that demonstrates how to stream features from ArcGIS Server and overlay them on top of Google Maps data. In this case, we will be working with parcel data.

This first example serves to demonstrate the basic concepts as succinctly as possible. In future posts, I will gradually refactor and improve upon the code to create reusable components. More...

When programming with ArcObjects and ArcGIS Server, code often follows a common pattern of connecting to ArcGIS Server, getting hold of an IServerContext, doing some work, and releasing the context. This leads to a lot of unnecessarily repeated setup and teardown code, usually taking a form similar to the following example:

IServerContext context = null;

try

{

    IGISServerConnection conn = new GISServerConnectionClass()

        as IGISServerConnection;

 

    // Connect as ASPNET or NETWORK SERVICE.

    // Get optional host setting from web.config,

    // or use localhost if not found.

    string host = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["AGSHost"];

    if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(host))

    {

        host = "localhost";

    }

 

    // Make connection

    conn.Connect(host);

    IServerObjectManager som = conn.ServerObjectManager;

    context = som.CreateServerContext("MyServer", "MapServer");

   

    // Do some stuff with the server context

}

finally

{

    if (context != null)

    {

        context.ReleaseContext();

    }

}

In this example, there is a lot of boilerplate happening just to get to the server context and do something interesting. Seeing this kind of code repeated throughout an ArcGIS Server project made me a little queasy as it violates the DRY Principle, so that got me thinking about how to eliminate it. More...