Testing one of our geodata services, we discovered that it allowed us to extract a portion of our feature class but when we tried to extract the entire data set, we received this Data Extraction error: Data extraction failed. Proxy or Gateway Server did not allow the URL. Check with your LAN administrator that Proxy or Gateway server is configured to allow the URL. The fact that I was able to extract a portion of the data and I could see the entire geodatabase get made and zipped led me to believe it was more of time-out issue.

One of the common functions I have to do is assign each record in a feature class with a unique identifier–normally just a sequential number from 1 to N. In ArcView 3.x, the formula was simply ‘rec + 1’ if I wanted to start with the number 1. In ArcGIS, the process got a little more complex–you had to write a little VBA in Field Calculator as described by ESRI.

I was working on a project and wanted my own custom mouse cursor and did not easily find a way to make your own in ESRI’s instructions. But, once you know how to do it, it is pretty easy. In Visual Studio, Add a New Item: Add a Cursor File: You can edit your cursor with the editor program in Visual Studio. Once you satisfied with how it looks, make sure that the Build Action on the cursor is ‘Embedded Resource’.

I’ve previously posted python code to check if a field index exists for both ArcGIs 9.3 and ArcGIS 10.0. Recently I have been working on a process that was using this code but it was not working because it looks for an index with a specific name. It was not working in this case because the name of the indexes was getting incremented as they were being created. For example, I was building an index on the table C5ST, field RelateId ([C5IX].

Random luck me to discovering a bug related to feature classes whose names start with ‘nd_'. It appears that you are allowed to create feature classes starting with ‘nd_’ but ArcCatalog will not display them. Further research shows this behavior also occurs for table and for ArcSDE (PostGres) geodatabases, personal geodatabase, and file geodatabases–I am using ArcCatalog 10.0. I first noticed something odd was occurring while importing a series of shapefiles into a geodatabases.

Discovered something today. I was working on an arcpy script that copies a raster dataset from a file geodatabase into a Postgres SDE geodatabase and then does some boring routine tasks–building stats, creating a mosaic dataset, adding the raster to the mosaic dataset and making a couple referenced mosaic datasets. It sometimes has trouble with the initial step of uploading the raster because of the sheer size of if (1m elevation raster for counties) and it failed today on one.

For some odd reason, I wanted to split all the arcs in a polyline feature class to a specific length–if a specific feature was longer than the target length, it would become two or more separate polyline records. Here is the bare-bones script that copies an existing feature class into a new feature class then processes each record, splitting it into multiple records if the polyline is longer than the user-specified tolerance.

During a process I was working on, I needed to compare a feature class before and after some edits. I did not quickly find anything in ArcToolbox but searching ArcResources led me to Change Detector script by Bruce Harold. After making a couple of tweaks–for some reason in one of my feature classes, the Shape field had an upper case ‘S’ and in the other it was a lower case ’s'.

Someone mentioned an idea on ArcIdeas for making various display settings on a feature classes scale-dependent. Right now some of that can be accomplished by loading a feature classes multiple times, adjusting the settings, and setting the visible range. Working more and more in ArcGIS Server, I can see the value of increased scale-dependent settings. I’m not sure how rapidly ESRI takes ‘Ideas’ into consideration but if you feel like it would benefit you, why not promote this idea: Scale Range, SQL Query and Symbology Rendering in ArcMap.

I have to often get a table structure for a feature class or table into either a spreadsheet or word processing document. There might be an easy way to do this in ArcGIS 10 but I haven’t found it. So, as is my nature, I decided to roll my own. This is a bare-bones script that iterates through the fields, printing the field name, type, width, and precision. There are three optional features to it: