Converting ArcGIS Spatially Enabled Dataframe to GeoJSON

Question

I've got a spatially enabled dataframe (SEDF) I'm trying to convert to a GeoJSON. Normally I do this as a 2 step process by creating a featureclass then converting that into a GeoJSON with SEDF.spatial.to_featureclass and arcpy.conversion.FeaturesToJSON; however, featureclasses can be cumbersome and it would be nice to skip this step altogether.

ESRI's SEDF website (https://developers.arcgis.com/python/guide/introduction-to-the-spatially-enabled-dataframe/) states that you can export an SEDF in many formats, including GeoJSON; however, I don't see an example of this process anywhere.

Does anyone know how this is done?

Answer 1

Neither the API documentation nor dir(pd.DataFrame.spatial) has any indication that there is a to_geojson() method. So there is no direct way to do this as far as I know.

However, instead of using to_featureclass(location) where you have to create an actual file, you could use to_featureset().

to_featureset() creates an arcgis.features.feature.FeatureSet instance which has a to_geojson property. The property's string value can be written to a file using Python's built-in features.

I am not sure if that is the best way to go but it will save you to write an unnecessary file and you can bypass arcpy...

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Using Esri's example from here to get some data to have a working example for demonstration:

import pandas as pd
from arcgis.features import GeoAccessor, GeoSeriesAccessor
from arcgis import GIS

gis = GIS()
item = gis.content.get("85d0ca4ea1ca4b9abf0c51b9bd34de2e")
feature_layer = item.layers[0]

# create a Spatially Enabled DataFrame object
sdf = pd.DataFrame.spatial.from_layer(feature_layer)

And here is the code converting the ArcGIS Spatially Enabled Dataframe to a GeoJSON:

featureset = sdf.spatial.to_featureset()

with open(r"d:\temp\test.geojson", "w", encoding="utf-8") as file:
    file.write(featureset.to_geojson)