This post is a continuation of last month’s post about analyzing location change with BigQuery. At the end of that post, I was already thinking of ways to extend the analysis and visualization. I decided to take the opportunity to explore Esri’s recently-announced ArcGIS Platform APIs. These APIs are the same that have been available via an AGOL subscription or an ELA, but they are now presented in a consumption-based model, similar to Google or Mapbox APIs, that allow you to make use of them without having to make a larger up-front commitment to the rest of the ArcGIS stack. Esri’s basemaps and their location services have always been high-quality, so it’s nice to see them available under a more accessible model.
Decided to use the Esri routing API to visualize possible routes between the various locations of the “Sample Asset” from my last post. I chose to build a very simple Node API to access the BigQuery data and use that API from a simple page that calls the Esri API and displays the output on a Leaflet map. The first thing I needed to do was add a little extra SQL in BigQuery to return coordinates in a format consumable by the Esri API. The raw API expects coordinates delimited as such:
-76.519989228,38.303696474000006;-76.695443826137989,38.376038894414251;-76.635015354340467,38.29745667728772;-76.519989228,38.303696474000006;-76.695443826137989,38.376038894414251;-76.635015354340467,38.29745667728772;-76.519989228,38.303696474000006;-76.495959193,38.236694621
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