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.

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:]

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’.

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.

I am working on an data-entry application to edit feature classes that contain several coded-value-domains. The problem with some of the domains, however, is that some entries have been added after the initial creation. So the first 25 entries are in alphabetical order and there are some stragglers at the end that are in the order they were appended. This can be confusing for users–they go to select ‘Milli Vanilli’ and look between ‘Madonna’ and ‘Motley Crue’ but can not find their favorite band there–they have to go to the end of the list to find their selection.

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'.

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:

I was making an edit (adding leading ‘0’s) to a coded-value domain in an SDE database and realized that my edits were changing the order of the rows of my domain. Rows were moved to the bottom of the list when they were edited. So I went through the process of converting my domain back to a table, made my edits in Access and exported the rows to a .dbf in the order I wanted them.