Introducing an Improved Documentation Experience for ArcGIS API for Python

Reliable, thorough documentation (“doc”) is an incredibly important part of any software.  Documentation can help you install, configure, troubleshoot, and most importantly, use the software.  If the software has an application programming interface (API), the documentation contains the details and descriptions of the classes, methods, functions, and properties in the API’s code syntax.    

ArcGIS API for Python contains thousands of functions for scripting and automating geospatial tasks and GIS organization management.  It’s documentation provides installation and setup instructions, tutorials, guides, samples, detailed release notes, and the API reference. 

Over the years, we’ve listened to your feedback about the Python API documentation and have made several new improvements in the 2.4.0 release. 

Access old versions of the docs 

From the ArcGIS API for Python home page, you can now access older versions of the documentation.  Note that this changes the URL of the home page from https://developers.arcgis.com/python/latest/ to the previous version https://developers.arcgis.com/python-2-3/. 

Improved navigation in the API reference 

The API reference now has a much more intuitive, easy-to-use experience.  In the list of modules, you can now click on each class to expand the list of available functions within that class.  Previously, you would have to click on the class, then manually scroll the API reference to find the specific function you need.  This made it difficult for some users to find functions they were looking for and led to a less-than-ideal experience when navigating the API reference. 

Now, you can simply click the class, click the function you need, and it will automatically jump directly to the details of that function. 

These are just two examples of recent improvements to the Python API doc.  We know how important the doc is for you to be successful with the API, so please continue to share your feedback with us in-person at conferences, or virtually via the ArcGIS API for Python Esri Community page or the ArcGIS API for Python public GitHub repo, and we’ll continue to work hard at improving it with each release. 

Happy coding!