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.

One of the standards in our databases is to store dates as 8-digit integer values in the format of yyyymmdd. This requires us to occasionally convert values from date fields into this format. We can do this in the ArcMap Field Calculator using this arcpy function: def datetodouble(inNum): splitList = str(inNum).split("/") return splitList [2] +("0"+ splitList [0])[-2:] +("0"+ splitList [1])[-2:]

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 have been working on a python script that I want (NEED) to run as a scheduled task on a remote machine. I got to the point that the script did exactly what I needed when I was interactively running it in a Windows session but had problems when running it as a scheduled task. The debugging process was cumbersome–make a change, schedule a task to run it, log out of the machine, and wait.

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.