Theme Manager

The National Park Service Theme Manager is a GIS application for browsing GIS data sets by theme, previewing the datasets and reading metadata. It provides an intuitive interface with advanced search capabilities. It is intended as an easy to use alternative to ArcCatalog.

The database of themes it uses are typically created and updated by a GIS data manager and made available to all the user's in an organization, however it also supports private theme lists created and managed by the user.

It is a Windows application and uses the .NET Framework 4.5, and WinForms. To enable GIS features, you must also have ArcObjects 10.x and/or Pro 2.5+.

Build

• Clone this repository to your local file system.
• Install the version of Microsoft Visual Studio Community supported by your version of ArcGIS. You may need a different version for Pro and for 10.x.
• For ArcGIS 10.x support:
  • Install the ArcObjects SDK (comes with ArcGIS Desktop 10.x).
  • Copy the file C:\Program Files (x86)\ArcGIS\Desktop10.8\bin\ESRI.ArcGIS.MetadataEditor.dll (or similar) to the ArcGis10x folder.
• For Pro 2.5+ support:
  • You must have ArcGIS Pro installed.
  • Copy the file C:\Program Files\ArcGIS\Pro\bin\Extensions\Metadata\ArcGIS.Desktop.Metadata.dll to the ArcGisPro folder.
  • Download and extract the File Geodatabase API. Copy Esri.FileGDBAPI.dll, FileGDBAPI.dll, and FileGDBAPID.dll from the 64bit folder to ArcGisPro folder. See ArcGisPro\Fgdb.cs or the readme with the download for details.
  • Install the Pro SDK as a visual studio extension (see https://github.com/Esri/arcgis-pro-sdk/wiki/ProGuide-Installation-and-Upgrade)
• Open ThemeManager.sln in Visual Studio.
• If building for ArcGIS Pro 2.5 or 2.6, add Pro25 or Pro26 as a Conditional compilation symbol in the Build tab of the properties page for the ArcGisPro project.
• Select Build -> Build Solution from the Visual Studio menu. If you are not supporting both ArcGIS Pro and 10.x, then you may need to build only the supported projects.
• If the file Docs/Help.md is edited then update the files ThemeManager/Html/Help.html by using a markdown to html converter like pandoc, an online convertor, or the atom editor which includes github styling. (This should be done before building to ensure a copy ends up in the bin/release folder)

Deploy

Theme Manager for 10.x

Detailed installation instructions are in the Help Documentation, however they assumes that you have downloaded Theme Manager from IRMA. The following instructions are how to build the zip file from the repo.

• Build a release version
• Delete the file ThemeManager10x/bin/release/ThemeManager.pdb
• For 10.x only, Copy ArcGis10x/bin/release/ArcGis10x.dll and `ArcGis10x/ESRI.ArcGIS.MetadataEditor.dll to ThemeManager10x/bin/release
• Copy the ThemeManager10x/bin/release folder to a new location renamed Theme Manager 3.x for ArcGIS 10.y (editing x and y as appropriate).
• Zip up Theme Manager 3.x for ArcGIS 10.y
• Distribute

Theme Manager for Pro

Instructions are the same as for 10.x above with the obvious corrections for file names and version numbers.

Using

See the Help document.

Projects

The Visual Studio solution file ThemeManager.sln contains several projects.

Library ArcGis10x

Implements a GisInterface class with a small set of static methods that implement all of the functions that require support from an external GIS system. In this case the ArcObjects 10.x libraries. This library also vends a custom implementation of the IGisLayer object to provide details about the GIS objects it supports.

Library ArcGisPro

Same as the ArcGis10x library but providing support for ArcGIS Pro.

Library NoGis

Same as the ArcGis10x library but provides no GIS support (also does not require the user to have any GIS software installed).

WinForm Application ThemeManager10x

Classic Theme Manager which links with the ArcGis10x library. It builds an app that expects the user to have ArcGIS 10.x installed and licensed.

WinForm Application ThemeManagerPro

Builds a version of Theme Manager which links with the ArcGisPro library. It expects the user to have ArcGIS Pro installed and licensed. This project has no code of it's own -- it links to the code in ThemeManager10x. A separate project is required because the Pro version requires 64bit and .net framework 4.8 both of which are incompatible with the 10.x version. This project is not required to build the Pro version, but makes it similar to build both projects without switching build parameters back and forth.

WinForm Application ThemeManagerNoGis

Builds a version of Theme Manager which links with the NoGis library. It does not expect the user to have any GIS installed or licensed. This project has no code of it's own -- it links to the code in ThemeManager10x and provide the different build instructions.

Command Line Utility tm

This project is a command line utility which when run with a theme list, i.e. $ tm \path\to\themelist.tml, will reload all the themes in the theme list, and re-sync all of the metadata.

This can be handy if there has been a major reorganization and update of the themes (layer files). However, it should be used with the understanding that it may overwrite any custom attribution that you might have added. For example if a data source has default (empty) metadata, then the re-sync will clear the tags, summary, description, etc, even if you have hand entered data for those fields. See Issue 12 for details.

This project is configured to link with ArcGis10x and build a tool that expects ArcGIS 10.x support. By changing the .net framework to 4.8 (from 4.5), the target platform to x64 (from x86), and referencing ArcGisPro in lieu of ArcGIS10x it can be run with ArcGIS Pro. Note that only the 10.x version will be able to reload themes based on *.lyr or *.mxd files, and only the Pro version will be able to reload themes based on a *.lyrx file.

Command Line Utility tmpro

This project also includes a command line utility called tmpro which when run will print a CSV report to the standard output listing all the data sources in the *.lyrx files in a folder tree. This report is useful to make sure that all the pro data sources are correctly interpreted by the Theme Manager code. The output can be compared with the DataSources report in the administrative reports menu.

See the discussion for the tm utility for how to build this app with support for reading a folder of *.lyr` files.