I was helping a co-worker who needed to check if a field exists in their arcpy script. Since we were located at their computer, I thought I would just do a quick Google search and pull the code off this blog. Seemed logical since I the original purpose was exactly that—to serve as a handy, public place to store code snippets that I use & that others might find handy.

In the last week, I have looked for multi-part features a couple of times. Today, I was looking for multi-part polygons after dealing with the fall-out of a case of Clip Gone Wild as shown below. I have not found a way to write a query to find these but Field Calculator does allow you to calculate a field’s value to the number of parts. Using the Python parser, just write the formula (note that case matters): !

Awhile ago, I had a ArcSDE problem that required ESRI technical support to help trouble-shoot. The problem was odd but was resolved by rebooting the server. During the process, though, the support person had me set a couple of environment variables for logging SDE activity on the client machine. The settings were SDEINTERCEPT and SDEINTERCEPTLOC. From ESRI’s Help, SDEINTERCEPT specifies what activity to log and SDEINTERCEPTLOC specifies where to save the log files.

Question: How do I get ArcMap to automatically pan through an area. As I mentioned in a previous post, I recently had the need to have ArcMap automatically pan through a project area. My first attempt was to print a series of data-driven pages (using a fishnet polygon layer as the index) this but that did not accomplish what I needed so I switched to arcpy, which made the task simple enough.

I recently had an internal request to capture and store the Bing imagery for an area for future use. The user was interested in some specific images that were taken after a fire, making the ground surface-and certain geological features-much more visible. His concern was that in the future this imagery might get replaced with updated imagery taken when the vegetation has grown back. Since it is unknown when/how this data might be used by us, we mostly wanted to capture it now & find a way to use it.

Seems like a lot of people are finding the ArcMap Field Calculator examples that I have posted useful so I will make an effort to post more of them. Most posts are generated after I do something and think that others might want to know how to do it. (Or so I can go back and remember how I did something without re-inventing it). Something I did today was create a field (!

You may have noticed that this post–ArcMap Field Calculator: Identifying Unique Cases, Single Field–specifies ‘Single Field’. Yes, that was my version of a cliff-hanger post. The basic structure I listed in that post can be expanded on to satisfy your needs. The example in my earlier post was case sensitive for example, you could modify it so it treats ‘a’ the same as ‘A’. Today’s example groups records into different cases based off the values of two fields, !

Received a request yesterday asking how to use the ArcMap Calculator to copy values from a Text field to a Double field using python syntax. As any good blogger would do, I immediately thought, ‘Awesome! Someone’s question is the perfect topic for a new blog post’. The python parser is actually pretty good at casting values on the fly so if the values in your text field (!Day! in my example) are valid values that can be converted to a Double value, it is as simple as just setting the formula to be the text field.

As contributor of the day, Jason Scheirer, pointed out, python has a simple, direct way to browse through the subdirectories of a directory–os.walk Here is a bare-bones example of using it to print out the subdirectories in a path. The files variable of the 3-tuple is a list of files similar to the dirs variable that I loop through. Thanks Jason for pointing out something I missed. import os theDir = 'c:/temp/' for root, dirs, files in os.

Someone asked how to have python recursively search a folder structure. There may be a better way but this is how I typically do it–it basically starts with one directory and loops through the contents compiling a list of sub-directories as it goes through the contents. import glob, os theDir = 'c:/temp/' theDirList = [] theDirList.append(theDir) while len(theDirList)> 0: newDirList = [] for iDir in theDirList: print iDir for iFile in glob.