Designing and Building Geoprocessing Tools from the Ground Up

—Dale Honeycutt

A geoprocessing tool does three pieces of work: it defines its parameters, validates its parameters, and executes some code that performs the actual work. This session will focus on the first two pieces—parameters and validation. At the end of this session, you will know how to define parameters using data types, direction, filters, dependencies, and multivalues. You will also gain a deep understanding of how a tool validates its parameters and describes its output for use in ModelBuilder. Armed with this knowledge, you'll be able to design and build a tool that is robust and useful regardless of what programming language you use for implementation. All concepts will be demonstrated by implementing Python script tools.