Python Toolbox 3 : Pythonnet

After logging and Pygments I want to uncover another useful Python tool called pythonnet. Pythonnet provides a way to call .NET assemblies from within Python. Its usage is very similar to that of IronPython and also comparable to that of ctypes which I used in my post about using the ArcGIS projection engine dll (pe.dll) to project coordinates.

To get working binaries for this project you need to make your hands a little bit dirty but with some small effort you're good to go. And although the last release is rather old I've read about people using it on Python 2.6 with .NET 3.5. Before anything I suggest you to read the readme because this will explain and clarify a lot of things. What I did is download the project from sourceforge and open the visual studio solution. Then I applied the patch described here. For more information about this patch and sample code to test whether the patch was applied successfully I suggest you to read this. Finally you have to build the solution and copiy the clr.pyd and Python.Runtime.dll to the root of your Python installation. In my case this is C:\Python24.
To test if everything went fine you can take a look at the demo directory in the pythonnet folder. I had to add import clr before the other import statements to make the samples work. This is not a bug but merely due to the fact that I used the standard Python executable.

One of the possible uses of pythonnet in a GIS context is when you're creating some arcgisscripting code but want to do things that can't be done with the Python bindings of ArcGIS. One of those things is a spatial filter although you can create a workaround with an extra query layer and the SelectLayerByLocation tool. I first created a static method called Hello to test if pythonnet worked with my dll. Then I created the CreateLayerFromSpatialIntersect method. The goal of this method is to do a bounding box query and export the queried features. This method takes input the path to a shapefile, a destination folder and name and the minimum and maximum values of x and y. The found features are exported to a new shapefile. I also added a helper method to get an IFeatureClass object from the shapefile. I also used the LicenseInitializer class. This class is part of the ArcGIS Console application template and has the sole purpose of getting and releasing an ArcGIS license.

using System;
using ESRI.ArcGIS.Geodatabase;
using ESRI.ArcGIS.Geometry;
using ESRI.ArcGIS.GeoDatabaseUI;
using ESRI.ArcGIS.esriSystem;
using ESRI.ArcGIS.DataSourcesFile;
namespace GisSolved.SpatialQueryTool
{
    public class SpatialQueryTool
    {

        public static string Hello()
        {
            return "Hello !!!";
        }
        public static void CreateLayerFromSpatialIntersect(string shapeSourcePath, string destinationFolder, string destinationName, double xMin, double xMax, double yMin,double yMax)
        {
            LicenseInitializer licenseInitializer = new LicenseInitializer();
            licenseInitializer.InitializeApplication(
    new esriLicenseProductCode[] { esriLicenseProductCode.esriLicenseProductCodeArcView },
    new esriLicenseExtensionCode[] { });

            IFeatureClass sourceFeatureClass = GetShapeFile(shapeSourcePath);

            // create  the spatial filter
            ISpatialFilter spatialFilter = new SpatialFilterClass();
            spatialFilter.SpatialRel = esriSpatialRelEnum.esriSpatialRelIntersects;

            IEnvelope boundingBox = new EnvelopeClass();
            boundingBox.XMax = xMax;
            boundingBox.XMin = xMin;
            boundingBox.YMax = yMax;
            boundingBox.YMin = yMin;

            spatialFilter.Geometry = (IGeometry)boundingBox;

            // create other parameters for the export operation
            IDataset sourceDataset = (IDataset)sourceFeatureClass;
            IDatasetName sourceDatasetName = (IDatasetName)sourceDataset.FullName;

            IFeatureClassName destinationClassName = new FeatureClassNameClass();
            IDatasetName destinationDatasetName = (IDatasetName)destinationClassName;

            destinationDatasetName.Name = destinationName;

            IWorkspaceName destinationWorkspaceName = new WorkspaceNameClass();
            destinationWorkspaceName.PathName = destinationFolder;
            destinationWorkspaceName.WorkspaceFactoryProgID = "esriDataSourcesFile.ShapefileWorkspaceFactory";
            destinationDatasetName.WorkspaceName = destinationWorkspaceName;

            // do the actual export
            IExportOperation exportOp = new ExportOperationClass();
            exportOp.ExportFeatureClass(sourceDatasetName, (IQueryFilter)spatialFilter, null, null, destinationClassName, 0);

            licenseInitializer.ShutdownApplication();
        }

        private static IFeatureClass GetShapeFile(string path)
        {
            string workspacePath = System.IO.Path.GetDirectoryName(path);
            string name = System.IO.Path.GetFileName(path);
            IWorkspaceFactory shapefileWorkspaceFactory = new ShapefileWorkspaceFactoryClass();
            IFeatureWorkspace workspace = (IFeatureWorkspace)shapefileWorkspaceFactory.OpenFromFile(workspacePath, 0);
            return workspace.OpenFeatureClass(name);
        }
    }
}

It's easy to use this code from pythhonnet. The first step is to build the .NET project and copy the resulting dll to the same directory as your Python code. Then you need to import clr and add a reference to the dll. Next thing to do is import the desired class from your assembly. Now you can use your class like you would do in IronPython. To test my code I exported 500.000 POIs to a shapefile which I then queried with the same bounding box as in my two previous posts about MongoDb and Rtree.

import clr
clr.AddReference('SpatialQueryTool')
from GisSolved.SpatialQueryTool import SpatialQueryTool

print SpatialQueryTool.Hello()

source= r"D:\source\poi_500000.shp";
destinationFolder = r"D:\destination";
destinationName = "poi_45_50_505_510_2";
SpatialQueryTool.CreateLayerFromSpatialIntersect(source, destinationFolder, destinationName, 4.5, 5.0, 50.5, 51.0)

I hope that this post was useful to you and as always I welcome any comments.