Node Dangles

Using a free StatCounter.com add-in, I get weekly emails showing the number of visitors to this blog. During the summer, the numbers plummeted. At the time, I thought it had to do with Google/Chrome requiring https. Luckily, HostGator (disclosure: I’m working on becoming a HostGator affiliate), who I use to host this blog and a few other websites, provided free https certificates for all of my sites. So I made sure that https://MapRantala.

Was sharing a python script with a php developer to illustrate how a couple of requests can be made to an ArcGIS REST endpoint. Nothing fancy–one gets the data for one record, one gets data for all records, and the final gets the data for the record that intersects a point. The only thing to note is that the original version that I shared gets a token because the service it uses is secured.

Because we use ArcGIS Online Web Maps in our daily work-flows, I created an AGO group that contains Feature Layers that are links to our self-hosted ArcGIS Server services. This way, users can quickly add data from our ArcGIS Server Site and not have to look up URLs/Usernames/Passwords (I’ve save the username/password as part of the ArcGIS Online service when appropriate). But I’ve had a problem where if I change the service, the changes are not reflected in the AGO Feature Layer for that service and I have to monkey about to get the changes to migrate to the maps.

Working with a routine process today that I normally only do once in awhile but today needed to do it several times. It requires changing the definition query on several features classes. Being the ‘lazy’ GIS guy that I am (owner of a company I used to work at called me that once as a sort of compliment for my tendency to script a lot of what I did), I decided to finally script it instead of changing definition queries about 42 times.

One of the great advancements over the last decade plus in GIS is that government agencies have started to move away from a ‘recover-our-cost’ mentality to more of an ‘Open Data’. Minnesota, for example, has launched their Geospatial Commons as a platform for sharing data. And while getting free, authoritative data is awesome, it can leave you in a bind if the structure of the data changes. Sometime between April and September, Hennepin County, Minnesota, changed the schema of their publicly available street centerlines data.

In April I started a new position at a company that had no existing GIS. Nothing. There was a definite need for GIS and some GIS-type functions were occuring but basically when I started, I had an ArcGIS Enterprise license and a mess of KML files. An exciting opportunity. And since I was starting from scratch, I had zero legacy concerns. No existing data, workflows, custom code, or maps to tie me to a specific software package.

A while ago I posted a work-around for a problem I was having with a Web AppBuilder application. Working with Esri tech support, we determined what I was doing to cause the problem. In my config.json, I was using a relative path to the proxy. Note that I had the proxy as a separate application at the root level of our domain because I intended to have a shared proxy for all of our applications instead of individual ones.

I recently downloaded Web AppBuilder 2.4, Developer’s Edition and built a quick & dirty app. For some reason, it worked fine in Web AppBuilder but once I deployed it, no basemaps would show in the Basemap Gallery widget, it would just spin, spin, spin. Digging around, I found some old posts where users were experiencing similar problems but none of the solution resulted in a great solution. I was able to get it to work by listing the basemaps individually in the config_BasemapGallery.

A Little Map I made for fun for Grandma’s Marathon ( @grandmasmara ) or click Here for the stand-alone map.

Working on doing some advanced ArcGIS server printing and had the need to batch convert many existing .mxd files to .lyr files. So instead of opening up X number of map documents, thought I would do it via code. All of my .mxds in this case had just one data frame so the process was pretty simple–I add an empty group layer (Thanks Petr Krebs for the idea), copy all the existing layers into it, and save it out as a layer file.