Hunter Ray- GIS Analyst
Have you become reliant on Attribute Rules in your desktop workflows? Are you frustrated that you can’t extend those to your ArcGIS Online users? Well, we feel your pain. Attribute Rules have greatly simplified some of our processes and we have been looking for ways to replicate those natively in ArcGIS Online. ArcGIS Notebooks provide a web-based tool for ArcGIS Online users to closely replicate workflows built around those Attribute Rules you know and love.
So, what exactly are ArcGIS Notebooks? ArcGIS Notebooks are an integrated version of Jupyter Notebooks that can harness Esri’s Python resources (ArcGIS API for Python and ArcPy), along with 379 other library packages. Since their ArcGIS Online debut in early 2020, they have become an extremely powerful tool in the ArcGIS Online toolbox. ArcGIS Notebooks provide an interactive (and collaborative!) web-based spatial data science workspace where users can automate workflows built around common processes like creating content, editing content, generating maps and even performing analysis. Esri’s documentation can be found here.
Generally, ArcGIS Notebooks are divided into cells that can be run individually or as a whole. You can leverage them in ArcGIS Pro as well as ArcGIS Online.
Important things to know before you start:
1. Users must have permission to create and edit Notebooks. Administrators have this ability by default, but the option must be added to an existing user role or you can create a custom role with this ability. This is because these Notebooks are very powerful and with great power comes great responsibility. Below are the options that can be toggled on:
2. Credits — There are three levels of Notebooks: Standard, Advanced, and Advanced with GPU Support. Standard Notebooks utilize the ArcGIS API for Python and do not use any credits. Advanced Notebooks add access to ArcPy while Advanced with GPU support lends you processing power. Both types of Advanced Notebooks consume credits based on calculation time.
3. Scheduling — What takes these Notebooks to the level of Attribute Rules is that they can be scheduled to run anywhere from every minute to once a year.
The uses for these Notebooks are endless: creating sequential IDs, concatenating fields, and calculating age of an asset just to name a few. And as the saying goes, if pictures are worth a thousand words, then videos are worth a million. Check out this video on how we’ve implemented rules to calculate an ID for newly created features to see how to put an ArcGIS Notebook into action. Got an idea for a Notebook but need help implementing? Reach out here.