14:15 - 14:25ish aRcGeo: initializing arcGIS and arcpy connections

Abstract

The development of aRcGeo is motivated by the problem of loading arcGIS spatial tools in an R environment. The aRcGeo package aims to unify the process of initializing an ArcGIS product and importing the arcpy python module into an R session. The function aRcGeo::init_arcpy() makes a call to arcgisbinding and imports from the reticulate package to initialize the arcpy python module. The function can take the name of a conda environment that is found when runnning reticulate::conda_list() or a local path to the arcpy python.exe file. Since all installations of arcpy automatically create a conda environment, the conda_env argument is preferrable.

The key findings I will be presenting on are the challenges posed by trying to initialize an ArcGIS environment in R without using the init_arcpy() function as well as demonstrating some of the capabilities in using ArcGIS functions in R after an initialization. I will also be demonstrating stress tests with invalid argument names and classes to demonstrate how the function responds. One major limitation of the package is that arcgisbinding must be installed in order for the function to initialize a connection to ArcGIS. The former package is not distributed for aRcGeo and is distributed as a windows only binary source file since ArcGIS Pro is a windows only software.

More information can be found on the corresponding aRcGeo Github repository