[GIS] Handling XML from within ArcGIS Server environment

arcgis-serverxml

In my company, there is a web service that serves geographic data stored in a remote dababase through an URL. This service makes queries to the database and encodes the required data in XML format. So, to query data from a table (for example User), I do something like:

http://myCompanyName/service/QueryUserTable

So the service returns back to the client's browser a XML with all users stored in that table. Now, I would like to do the same from ArcGIS software: The thing would be connect this desktop application to that remote service, retrieve that XML file and parse it but all inside ArcGIS environment, not using other scripts or programs outside it. Is it possible? :S

Just in case it is not possible to do what I said, what is the best approach to handle and manage traffic in XML using ArcGIS?

It is a good idea and I like the way of retrieving the parameters like this long link you pasted. Didn't know about that module since I am pretty new with ESRI software.

But there is another constraint I did not mention in my first post. As the company is big, there is another "handicap" or problem: At this beginning stage I will have no control over the remote service, another developers group will "decide" how to encode the data. I mean, I think I cannot decide if the remote service is SOAP or not, REST or not and therefore, I don't know the XML tags they will use for the encoding. Maybe I can use the module you mention to connect to the service but I am not sure how data will be served on the other counterpart…

I guess I will be told the general schema of the files, and then I have to try to connect ArcGIS to that remote service and prepare some scripts to parse the incoming XML and allow non-IT users to use it in their layers…

Does it make sense? What do you think? It is a bit difficult to explain!

Best Answer

why dont you use ArcGIS SOAP or REST service interfaces. it already gives you what you want... it has query field which returns the result as html,json,kmz and amf too..

you can check out some service here, at least in terms of giving an idea...

This is an example service link, will return you id:129 object properties:

http://server.arcgisonline.com/ArcGIS/rest/services/Demographics/USA_Unemployment_Rate/MapServer/1/query?text=129&geometry=&geometryType=esriGeometryPoint&inSR=&spatialRel=esriSpatialRelIntersects&relationParam=&objectIds=&where=&time=&returnCountOnly=false&returnIdsOnly=false&returnGeometry=true&maxAllowableOffset=&outSR=&outFields=&f=pjson

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The first place I would check are the logs in the event viewer on the remote server. I see you have 'SQL' in the path there. If you're connecting to a database, ensure the process owner (which I believe would be the ArcGIS Server admin account if you're running it as a GP tool in AGS) has access to the database if you use Active Directory authentication.

You can enable history logging on the remote server as described in this article. That might also give you some clues.

I hope that's a little bit of help. Good luck!

[GIS] Writing ISO 19139 compliant XML metadata from spreadsheet

One way of doing it is to generate a really simple XML tree for each record in your spreadsheet, write an XSLT stylesheet to translate from your simple XML to ISO 19139, then use lxml.etree.XSLT to transform.

The major advantage of this is it keeps the complex iso19139 XML out of your python code which makes it much easier to debug. Some more info/tutorials on xslt here and here.

Here's some example code:

from lxml import etree
import os.path

def list_to_xml(datalist,rootname):
    '''Transform a metadata record to a flat XML string'''

    root = etree.Element(rootname)

    for fld in datalist:
        col=fld[0]
        dat=str(fld[1]) # may need to be careful of unicode encoding issues
                        # when reading data from Excel

        child=etree.SubElement(root,col)
        child.text=dat

    return root

def transform(inxml,xslfile):
    xslfile=os.path.abspath(xslfile).replace('\\','/') #xslt doesn't like backslashes in absolute paths...
    xsl = etree.parse(xslfile)
    xslt = etree.XSLT(xsl)
    return xslt(inxml)

xslfile = 'test.xslt'

#Column headers from the Excel spreadsheet
header=['column1','xmin','ymin','xmax','ymax','thelastcolumn']

#Data pulled out of the spreadsheet
#You would loop over all rows and do a transform on each row
row=['A value',1.2345,5.4321,2.3456,6.5432,'last value']

inxml = list_to_xml(zip(header,row),"ExcelMetadata")
print etree.tostring(inxml)

#The above prints - <ExcelMetadata><column1>A value</column1><xmin>1.2345</xmin><ymin>5.4321</ymin><xmax>2.3456</xmax><ymax>6.5432</ymax><thelastcolumn>last value</thelastcolumn></ExcelMetadata>

iso19139 = transform(inxml,xslfile)
print str(iso19139)

The 'test.xslt' stylesheet referred to in the above code is:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"   
  xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
  xmlns:fn="http://www.w3.org/2005/xpath-functions" 
  xmlns:xdt="http://www.w3.org/2005/xpath-datatypes" 
  xmlns:gco="http://www.isotc211.org/2005/gco" 
  xmlns:gmd="http://www.isotc211.org/2005/gmd" 
  xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" 
  xmlns:gts="http://www.isotc211.org/2005/gts" 
  xmlns:gsr="http://www.isotc211.org/2005/gsr" 
  xmlns:gss="http://www.isotc211.org/2005/gss" 
  xmlns:gmx="http://www.isotc211.org/2005/gmx" 
  xmlns:gml="http://www.opengis.net/gml" 
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.isotc211.org/2005/gmd http://www.isotc211.org/2005/gmd/gmd.xsd">

  <xsl:output method="xml" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes"/>
  <xsl:template match="/ExcelMetadata">

      <gmd:fileIdentifier>
        <gco:CharacterString><xsl:value-of select="column1"/></gco:CharacterString>
      </gmd:fileIdentifier>

      <!-- Lots of other xml stuff -->

      <xsl:if test="normalize-space(thelastcolumn)">
        <gmd:someelement>
          <gco:CharacterString><xsl:value-of select="thelastcolumn"/></gco:CharacterString>
        </gmd:someelement>
      </xsl:if>

      <gmd:identificationInfo>
        <gmd:MD_DataIdentification>
          <gmd:extent>
            <gmd:EX_Extent>
              <gmd:geographicElement>
                <gmd:EX_GeographicBoundingBox>
                  <gmd:extentTypeCode>
                    <gco:Boolean>1</gco:Boolean>
                  </gmd:extentTypeCode>
                  <gmd:westBoundLongitude>
                    <gco:Decimal><xsl:value-of select="xmin"/></gco:Decimal>
                  </gmd:westBoundLongitude>
                  <gmd:eastBoundLongitude>
                    <gco:Decimal><xsl:value-of select="xmax"/></gco:Decimal>
                  </gmd:eastBoundLongitude>
                  <gmd:southBoundLatitude>
                    <gco:Decimal><xsl:value-of select="ymin"/></gco:Decimal>
                  </gmd:southBoundLatitude>
                  <gmd:northBoundLatitude>
                    <gco:Decimal><xsl:value-of select="ymax"/></gco:Decimal>
                  </gmd:northBoundLatitude>
                </gmd:EX_GeographicBoundingBox>
              </gmd:geographicElement>
            </gmd:EX_Extent>
          </gmd:extent>
        </gmd:MD_DataIdentification>
      </gmd:identificationInfo>

    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Best Answer

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