ArcGIS Project Management with Production Mapping

ESRI's Production Mapping has a lot of useful tools and functionality. I think its kind of like that drawer in your house where you put things that are really great for something but not necessarily needed for anything.

For me the documentation is rarely clear or concise enough to understand so I just have to tinker with it until I find something that works.

Recently I dove into the Product Library. I am working on a project where the product will be a workflow to create maps. The workflow includes some script tools but the goal is to use as much out of the box functionality as possible. Anyways, the development process requires setting up MXDs, tool boxes, scripts with config files, layout rules, styles, and just about anything else GIS related. It turns out the Product Library is a great way to sync all these things between team members.

I have not really figured the structure yet but after setting up a "Solution"  and a "Product Class" we are able to check in and out everything to a versioned SDE database. If we choose to check everything out to the same location on our respective machines the MXDs, toolboxes and what not stay working.

I'm just saying its neat that's all.

Converting Decimal Degrees to Degrees Minutes Seconds with Python

Thanks to this post at Another GIS Blog I was saved the time of having to figure out how to do this calculation on my own.

And I just the author posted that TODAY, just 8 hours ago. That is crazy.

Thanks Guy.

Tricky Data driven pages

I was having a problem with a data driven pages script where I needed to use the pageRow property to access an attribute. The only examples I found required hard coding the field name but after a little Googleing I found someones suggestion to use:

fieldName = arcpy.GetParameterAsText(1)
mxd.dataDrivenPages.pageRow.getValue(fieldName)


This brings in the field name from the input.

i5 2500k and ASUS P8P67 R3 1155 not boot, not posting, nothing...

I was having problems with my machine, which I just built about 3 months ago. I would hit the power button and the power light on the case would give a quick flash and the CPU and GPU fans would give about one rotation then nothing. If I hit the power button again nothing would happen. So I would turn the PSU off for a few seconds then try again. This would get me the same results 5-10 times until I would get lucky and the machine would start up. Once up the machine worked great. No problems at all for how ever long I had it running. But after turning it off it was back to the same dance to get it going again.

Everything in the build was 3 months old with the exception of my OCZ 600w power supply and my hard drive.. After trying about everything I could find on the google machine I decided it must be the power supply.

After picking up a new PSU and testing it I found that was the issue. I have had the new PSU in for a few days now and done a bunch of cold starts and no problems...

I am disappointed that my OCZ psu died. It was a nice PSU and only 3 years old. I always kept it clean too...

Oh well.

This post is an object

This post has been instantiated and so its an object now. I think.

I have been focusing on learning ArcObjects on .NET via C# the last couple weeks and the last few days I finally feel like I am starting to get it. I think the key has been grasping the Object Oriented approach. These articles are what really got be moving with that.They are pretty generic and quick to get through, which helps me.
http://www.developer.com/lang/article.php/3628381/The-Object-Oriented-Thought-Process-Index-Page.htm

As for C# in particular this series has helped me get a grasp on the basics.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/bb308730.aspx

Other than that I want to start posting something useful so...

I found that the ArcObject IQuerDef2 only allows "advanced" SQL queries on SDE databases... or at least not on file geodatabases. For example, the following works on an SDE but not File geodatabase.


 IFeatureWorkspace featureWorkspace = workspace;
            IQueryDef2 queryDef = (IQueryDef2)featureWorkspace.CreateQueryDef();
            queryDef.Tables = inTable;
            queryDef.PrefixClause = "TOP (29)"; 
            queryDef.SubFields = field + ", COUNT(*)";
            queryDef.PostfixClause = "GROUP BY " + field + " ORDER BY COUNT(*) DESC, " + field; 
            queryDef.WhereClause = field + "!= ''"; 

I never found this documented anywhere but after testing a ton of queries on both sources its clear.

Maybe someday there will be an IQuerDefX that will support it. Or maybe it will come down to the File GDB format since the SQL probably gets thrown to the database anyways.

Map Symbology

So lets say you have a fancy map (ArcMap MXD) and you spend lots of time tweaking symobology. You can save that symbology one by one or you can get your self the Export Map Styles button and do it with two clicks.

This is sort of hidden now on Arc 10 but its still there and it can save you a ridiculous amount of time.

More details here: http://blogs.esri.com/Support/blogs/mappingcenter/archive/2010/09/28/Symbols-and-Styles-in-ArcGIS-10.0.aspx

Getting more of what someone paid for.

I am starting to really like Visual Studio 2010. My new favorite thing is historical clipboard.

Ctrl+Shift+V will cycle through the clipboard's history allowing you to paste things you copied a while ago. Nice when you are hacking stuff together.