Replicating ArcGIS Pro context with arcpy

timbkennedy

I want to automate a workflow I have in ArcGIS Pro using arcpy.

I am running the Near tool against two secured Portal services within ArcGIS Pro. Everything works well when running it through ArcGIS Pro - I simply run the tool and it successfully updates the secured services.

When I try to automate it I copy the Python snippet for the tool. This is where I run into problems. Naturally within the ArcGIS Pro environment, the layer names have a context as they reference a specific layer (with defined definition queries) within a map within a project. When in an isolated Python environment this context is lost along with the Portal connection.

My question is how can I replicate these within a Python environment? I have seen URL's being used as tool inputs, but these don't honor the definition queries, nor do they take care of authentication.

Thanks for any suggestions and insight.

timbkennedy

Thanks Dan - the ArcGIS API for Python analysis tools are pretty limited in comparison to arcpy. The Near tool does exactly what I want.

What I ended up doing was downloading the datasets I needed, running the analysis locally using arcpy, then converting the output to JSON, creating a feature set from that before adding it to the Feature Layer via the ArcGIS API for Python. Appending is not supported with our Enterprise version.

The limitation added complexity that I didn't initially consider, but I got there in the end! It would be great if arcpy could run on secured Feature Layers though - it would have simplified the flow quite a bit.