using a web service to populate sparse data

Question

Hi, I am nothing but a wee baby when it comes to python, know some ultra-simple things to make repetitive tasks faster. But I need some help and googling hasn't gotten me any really usable results yet. Probably I'm just not using the right vocabulary. I frequently have to go through piles and piles of sparse data and fill in missing values. Generally this requires querying over the web using a known value or two. This query service has a REST endpoint and would be a good candidate for automating, I think. If anyone has any snippets of code that would: * Take a value from a particular field in a feature class (say, EVENT ID) * Send that value as an argument to a base URL (for example, http://www.some_gis_service.com/lookup//details) * Look through the XML return and find a particular tag (for example, 2014-01-01T03:00:00) * update a field with that value (or some parsing thereof) Does this make sense? I'd probably want to build in some sort of dependency or pause between calls so that I don't overwhelm the server. Thanks for any help! Eric

XanderBakker · Answer

Sounds good! If you are willing to share this with the community it would be great.

Kind regards, Xander

EricEagle · Answer

Thanks Xander!  Since reading this I have a script now that uses a dictionary to store results and then query that first before going out and hitting the service.  Thanks for the links,

Eric

XanderBakker · Answer

If you want some python examples of how to extract features from a REST end point using python, you can find some in this thread: Re: Extract Features From MapServer/ Rest/ Soap/ etc?  Jake Skinner created a toolbox to do this.

There are also references to some python code I wrote to do this:

the simple way:https://community.esri.com/thread/118781#445348‌

or using a little more advanced:https://community.esri.com/thread/118781#445572

You can find an example of updating a feature service through Python and REST here:

Re: UpdateFeature REST API Python Script Unexpected Error‌

Filip Kral mentions an interesting Python client for ArcGIS for Server and this post (Loading ArcGIS REST Service data into Excel ) by Marc Hoogerwerf is worth reading too.

Kind regards, Xander