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Node Dangles

Misc

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 Little Map I made for fun for Grandma’s Marathon ( @grandmasmara ) or click Here for the stand-alone map.
I’ve been asked this twice this week, so thought I should post it. Calculating Null values in the ArcMap Field Calculator is easy, if you can remember the right work for ‘Null’. The proper word is ‘None’ (without the quotes). Good luck & have a good weekend.
I had a user with a series of GPS points (that were in chronological order) that they wanted to know the accumulated distance from the start to each point in their shapefile. First, we calculated the distance from each point to the previous point into a field called [DistFt]. Then, we hacked out this quick python function to accumulate the total distance in Arcmap’s Field Calculator: totalDistance = 0 def accumulateDistance(inDist): global totalDistance totalDistance += inDist return totalDistance And we called it:
In building our Enterprise GIS Database, we need to support users with different needs. Some of our users just need to see the data on a map while others may want to download a copy of the data so they can use it within their own desktop system. After doing some exploring, one of the options that looks like it will feel the bulk of our internal needs is to create a Map Service/Geodata Service pair–by creating a Map Service, we can make an easy-to-use visual representation of our data.
We finally installed an instance of ArcSDE 10 today. My first attempt at connecting in ArcCatalog 9.3.1 failed with the following error: Failed to connect to the specified server. This release of the GeoDatabase is either invalid or out of date. [Please run the ArcSDE setup utility using the -o install option.] DBMS table not found [sde.sde.GDB_Release]  Turns out the solution was simple, this article points out that Service pack 2 is required.
Related to my post on how I enable a script to accept parameters from different sources, I also often set up pythons scripts to output information a variety of ways. This is largely due to the fact that some are called by ArcToolbox scripts. Running in ESRI’s domain, these scripts need to send the output through the arcgisscripting object but if you are running the python outside the ArcGIS framework, you can just print.
UPDATE: After receiving a request to modify the code to ignore .lock files, I have an updated to this post.  I’ve received a request on how to use the Zip Shapefile code I posted last week from ArcGIS. Sorry, I did not set the code up to call directly from ArcGIS but only as an illustration of how it can be done. I have, however, with some minor tweaking, made a version that can added to ArcToolbox.
Subtitled: Why error messages are good. Came up with another error while running TopoToRaster but this time ArcGIS gave an error message that led to a solution. Turned out all my contour lines had an elevation of 16 which TopoToRaster did not like. I had intended to increase the elevation and inadvertently set them all to sixteen. I had saved the previous values before editing so it turned out to be a simple fix and I didn’t have to spend a day trying figure out what was wrong.
Stumbled across ArcBruTile, an ArcMap application that allows you to display map tile services–such as OpenStreetMap, Google Maps, Bing, Spatial Cloud, and Tile Map Service (TMS)–in your ArcMap documents. It works pretty well from my preliminary testing of it. I have found that at times that the graphical tiles are distorted but I am guessing it is because they are optimized for display in a specific projection, at specific scales and, in ArcMap, you can use any projection/scale combination you want.
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