Consume geojson web service in ArcMap

Question

I need to consume data from a REST endpoint that returns features in geojson format within a model in ArcGIS 10.2. Is there a way to access a URL instead of opening a file?

If there is no way to access a URL directly, would this require a custom python script to access the URL and save it to a local file, or is there a better way?

Answer 1

I ended up using a simple python script converted into a Tool:

import urllib2, arcpy

url = arcpy.GetParameterAsText(0)
path = arcpy.GetParameterAsText(1)

response = urllib2.urlopen(url)
localFile = open(path, 'w')
localFile.write(response.read())
localFile.close()

There may be a more elegant solution but this works for now. It would be easy enough to have the script convert the geojson to a featureset but with this generic download tool any data type can be retrieved in a model then converted as needed.