I had a situation at work a few weeks back where an individual needed 180 maps within a few hours. The maps themselves weren’t overly complex, they required satellite imagery as the basemap, some Ordnance Survey mapping overlaid with each map showcasing a particular site (in the Greater London area). I knew I wouldn’t be able to turn these around if I had to export them manually so enter ArcPy and the power of data driven pages in ArcMap.

I used the basic ‘Grid Index Features‘ tool to create the index for the mapbook and I then created the mapbook as normal. I needed each page to only show one site, to achieve this there is a little workaround in ArcMap to white-out irrelevant features.

The next step was to insert dynamic text for each page using a value from the attribute table (this was the layer name). I carried out a spatial join between the polygons (which contained the field with the polygon/page name) and the grid index features so that each grid index polygon would have the page/polygon name as an attribute. I then used this guidance to ensure each page had its own page number.

Although, it would have been possible to export the mapbook from the ‘File’ menu, it would just export one (quite large) pdf with a single filename as opposed to 180 individual PDFs with each having the correct label and title. I then wrote the following python function in order to export each page. If the same file name is exported more than once it appends an underscore and number to the end. It then took about 20 minutes to export the 180 plans, automation for the win!

#Export Data Driven Pages to PDF (Proper Names)
import arcpy, os
def export_pdf_maps():
	strOutpath = r"\\Output_Location"
	mxd = arcpy.mapping.MapDocument(r"\\Example.mxd")
	ucodes = {}
	for pageNum in range(1, mxd.dataDrivenPages.pageCount + 1):
		mxd.dataDrivenPages.currentPageID = pageNum
		pageorder = mxd.dataDrivenPages.pageRow.U_Code
		#Check if we have already found this Ucode
		if pageorder not in ucodes:
			ucodes[pageorder] = 0
		ucodes[pageorder] += 1
		pdfname = pageorder + "_" + str(ucodes[pageorder]) + ".pdf"
		print(pdfname)
		if os.path.exists(strOutpath + pdfname):
			print("Error", pdfname)		    
		arcpy.mapping.ExportToPDF(mxd, strOutpath  + pdfname)
	del mxd