App 2 – the restaurant mapping application

This is the second example that features a restaurant mapping application where you will build an application on top of ArcGIS for Desktop that allows users to view, search, highlight restaurants on the map, and compare their ratings and reviews.

Belize is thriving with tourism. Lots of tourists go there on holidays to enjoy its beautiful beaches and a wide range of restaurants. The government of Belize is trying to enrich the tourists' experience by finding their favorite restaurants in the country more effectively.

To accomplish that, a new project titled Bestaurants has been proposed to design a restaurant mapping application on top of ArcGIS for Desktop to feature the best restaurants in Belize. The application will contain a map that shows the city of Belize and the restaurants with key icons based on the restaurant type. For example, a café will be shown as a coffee mug and a restaurant will be displayed as a fork and a knife. Users should be able to search for restaurants by name, region, category, or rating.

Using the Bestaurants geodatabase, we will build this application from scratch to satisfy these requirements. In Chapter 5, App 2 – Extending ArcObjects, we start off by learning a bit about a different deployment approach with ArcObjects. We learn about building our first toolbar on ArcMap and add a button to it. We will learn how to query the subtypes that we have mentioned in the ArcGIS geodatabase section and populate them in a form. We will then filter the restaurants based on a selected subtype. We will kick off Chapter 6, Reviews and Ratings, by talking about relationships and then use this knowledge to learn how to query relationship classes in ArcObjects. This will be useful to retrieve ratings and reviews since these are related information that is located in another table. We will also learn how to filter the layer to show searched results. Finally, in Chapter 7, Advanced Searching, we include the region feature class and use the intersect tool to find all restaurants within a region and populate them in the form. We will also show how to add a text box to our toolbar and add search functionality to search for results as we type in the text box. This will make it easy for users to simply type the name or even part of the name of the restaurant and show it on the map.