Accessing and creating content¶
Your GIS can host a variety of maps, web layers, analytical tools, apps and individual files. Using the gis module, you can search for, access and manage all your folders, contents and automate such maintenance workflows as scripts.
In this page, we are going to observe how the following can be accomplished:
import os
import shutil
import datetime as dt
import pandas
from arcgis.gis import GIS
Searching for content¶
Accessing the content property of your gis object returns you an instance of ContentManager class. You can use the search() method of the ContentManager object to search for items on your GIS. You can use the search() even if you are connected as an anonymous user, in which case you get to search for public content on ArcGIS Online.
The first step is to import the API and connect to your GIS
from arcgis.gis import GIS
gis = GIS(profile="your_enterprise_profile")
Lets see what you get when you access content property
type(gis.content)
As explained earlier, we don't recommend creating an instance of the ContentManager directly, but instead recommed accessing it through the content property of your GIS object as shown below:
search_result = gis.content.search(query="title:Ports along US West Coast", item_type="Feature Layer")
search_result
The search() method returned us a list of Item objects that matched the search criteria and that the logged in user had permissions to access. The query parameter supports a variety of inputs, refer to the search reference for more ideas on what is supported. Some typical examples are shown below:
# search and list all feature layers in my contents
search_result = gis.content.search(query="", item_type="Feature Layer")
search_result
Notice how the search result includes items owned by other users that are shared across the organization. You can limit the search to only your content by specifying that in the query string as shown below:
search_my_contents = gis.content.search(query="owner:arcgis_python",
item_type="Feature *")
search_my_contents
Wild card search¶
Search supports usage of wild cards. You can use one asterisk * for multiple character wild card search and one question mark ? for single character.
search_result_USA = gis.content.search(query="title:USA*")
search_result_USA
Searching for content outside your portal¶
So far, we searched for content that belonged to the logged in user, as well as items shared within the portal and published by built-in accounts and other named users in the same portal. When connected to ArcGIS Online or connected to ArcGIS Enterprise configured to access ArcGIS Online, you can also search for content published and shared publicly even if the named users are in other portals. You can do so by turning the outside_org flag to True.
# search for content that begin with a prefix - say 'USA'
search_result_USA = gis.content.search(query="title:USA*", outside_org=True)
search_result_USA
Notice the Living Atlas content returned in the results. The portal administrator configured the portal to access Living Atlas centent.
When using the Jupyter notebook environment, you can utilize the rich representation of items for your query results.
from IPython.display import display
for item in search_result_USA:
display(item)
Feature Layer Collection by esri_livingatlas
Map Image Layer by esri_livingatlas
Once you know an item's id (called itemId), you can access it using the get() method instead of searching for it.
# lets get the itemid of first item from previous query
first_item = search_result_USA[0]
known_item_id = first_item.id
print(known_item_id)
# lets use the get() to access this item
online_historic_item = gis.content.get(known_item_id)
online_historic_item
Searching for content in ArcGIS Online¶
So far, we searched for content accessible to a user logged into ArcGIS Enterprise. Let's connect directly to an ArcGIS Online Organization and futher explore ways to search for web GIS content.
# connect to ArcGIS Online
gis2 = GIS(profile="your_online_profile")
Let us search for public web scenes visualizing 3D cities.
Note: , Use the
sort_fieldparameter to order the content that is returned. In this case, the results are ordered with most larger number of views returned first. Themax_itemsparameter can restrict the number of results returned, which can help with slow queries or queries with many possible results.
public_3d_city_scenes = gis2.content.search(query="3d cities", item_type = "web scene",
sort_field="numViews" ,sort_order="asc",
max_items = 15, outside_org=True)
for item in public_3d_city_scenes:
display(item)
Web Scene by Esri_NL_Content
