Esri Australia Dev Meet Up 27/09/12. Presentation from Mark Donnelly

1. Printing & Web Mapping
Applications
Mark Donnelly
Professional Services Consultant
Esri Australia

2. Why Printing?
• Most web mapping applications require the ability to print the map
area.
• There are some special challenges surrounding printing the
contents of the map area from a browser.
• ArcGIS Server 10.1 has just arrived and promises to make
developers lives easier.

3. What are the challenges?
- Browsers aren't very good at printing the map area.
- The problem is that browsers don’t deal very well with
images overlayed on top of each other.
- Each browser (IE, Firefox, Chrome) deal with this
problem in different ways. See this web map:

4. This is how the different browsers handle printing the web map:
IE
Firefox
Chrome

5. What are your options?
• To be sure all browsers will display the map area
faithfully, we must give it just one image to print.
• This can be done in at least two ways:
- Write some code that sits on the server, exports each
map service to get the various images and then creates
a composite image, which is returned to the browser for
printing.
- Write some client side code that does more or less the
same thing. I recently used a HTML canvas object
emulator called FXCanvas to do just this.

6. More Options
• As of ArcGIS 10 it has been possible to create large
format, high resolution print layouts using Python
scripting and the arcpy libraries.
• Very recently ArcGIS Server 10.1 was released and it
provides out of the box printing functionality via its
printing service.

7. The Printing Service
• Is available already installed under the Utilities folder
of the ArcGIS Server. It is simply a published
geoprocessing service for the Export Web Map Task
tool.
• Looking at the REST endpoint we can see there is
the Export Web Map Task endpoint and it accepts the
following parameters:

9. How Do I Use It?
• The best way to access the print service is via the
ArcGIS APIs (JavaScript, Flex, Silverlight).
• I’ll demo an app for you now that consumes a
number of map services, allows the user to draw
graphics and provides a drop down list of the
available layouts.

10. What Does the Code Look Like?

11. What if I Want to Use My Own Layouts?
• The out of the box print service uses a predefined set
of 8 layouts. To nominate different print layouts you
need to create your own print service.
• Corresponding to the REST endpoint, there is a new
tool called Export Web Map which allows the user to
define which directory is holding the desired layouts.
• You simply publish this tool, defaulting the layout
folder directory path to the required location.
• This published tool can be consumed by the print
task widget as it has the same parameters as the
REST endpoint.

12. Can I Print High Res, Large Format Maps?
• Yes this is possible but not with the printing service.
The printing service is restricted to 8 predefined
layouts, the largest of which is 279 X 432 mm (11 X
17”) (tabloid).
• It can be done with the arcpy Python libraries.
• Create and publish a Python tool that exports the
web map area to an MXD and then use the MXD
printing tools to create high res, large format maps.
• Available from ArcGIS 10.

13. Questions?