Design

From a design perspective, ArcGIS Desktop isn't terribly complex. We'll spend a fair amount of time up front, preparing the map document. We'll add a floodplain layer to the map document file, create a grid index layer, enable data-driven pages, and prepare the layout view. After the map document has been prepared, we'll create a new Python add-in containing a button that will trigger the creation of the book map. The Python add-in will have a single button, which will contain an onClick() method. The onClick() method will append the individual map pages to a single output PDF file using the PDFDocument class in the arcpy.mapping module as shown in the following screenshot:

Let's get started and build the application.