Because we use ArcGIS Online Web Maps in our daily work-flows, I created an AGO group that contains Feature Layers that are links to our self-hosted ArcGIS Server services. This way, users can quickly add data from our ArcGIS Server Site and not have to look up URLs/Usernames/Passwords (I’ve save the username/password as part of the ArcGIS Online service when appropriate). But I’ve had a problem where if I change the service, the changes are not reflected in the AGO Feature Layer for that service and I have to monkey about to get the changes to migrate to the maps.

Working with a routine process today that I normally only do once in awhile but today needed to do it several times. It requires changing the definition query on several features classes. Being the ‘lazy’ GIS guy that I am (owner of a company I used to work at called me that once as a sort of compliment for my tendency to script a lot of what I did), I decided to finally script it instead of changing definition queries about 42 times.

A while ago I posted a work-around for a problem I was having with a Web AppBuilder application. Working with Esri tech support, we determined what I was doing to cause the problem. In my config.json, I was using a relative path to the proxy. Note that I had the proxy as a separate application at the root level of our domain because I intended to have a shared proxy for all of our applications instead of individual ones.

Working on doing some advanced ArcGIS server printing and had the need to batch convert many existing .mxd files to .lyr files. So instead of opening up X number of map documents, thought I would do it via code. All of my .mxds in this case had just one data frame so the process was pretty simple–I add an empty group layer (Thanks Petr Krebs for the idea), copy all the existing layers into it, and save it out as a layer file.

Recently I’ve created Python add-ins for data entry for our staff. Most of these have a toolbar with a ‘Help’ button that opens a help file in .pdf format.Sample python add-in toolbar. The first add-in was for ArcCatalog and this worked splendidly. I was using os.startfile(path to help.pdf). However, when I started doing ArcMap add-ins, clicking the Help button would open the help.pdf but ArcMap would crash. Oops! Luckily the Python development team at Esri already had a blog post about this at their ArcPy Café blog.

I just had the need to go through a directory containing many (100+) layer files (.lyr) and verify the data sources in each. I could have loaded each into ArcMap and checked the properties, but choose not to. Here’s the bare-bones script I used instead: import arcpy, glob,os theDir = r"L:\gdrs\data\org\us_mn_state_dnr\elev_minnesota_lidar\\" os.chdir(theDir) for iFile in glob.glob("*.lyr"): print iFile lyr = arcpy.mapping.Layer(iFile) for i in arcpy.mapping.ListLayers(lyr): try: print " {0}: {1}".format(i,i.dataSource) except: print " {0}: Does not support dataSource".

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.

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.