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.

One of the great advancements over the last decade plus in GIS is that government agencies have started to move away from a ‘recover-our-cost’ mentality to more of an ‘Open Data’. Minnesota, for example, has launched their Geospatial Commons as a platform for sharing data. And while getting free, authoritative data is awesome, it can leave you in a bind if the structure of the data changes. Sometime between April and September, Hennepin County, Minnesota, changed the schema of their publicly available street centerlines data.

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".

I mentioned using Tapiriik to batch download my entire Garmin Connect history–over 1,000 separate .GPX files. I found several tools to convert .GPX to shapefiles that worked but none seemed to recognize my heart rate data. The trick is Garmin extends the GPX specification to incorporate the heart rate: <span style="color: #333333;">xmlns:gpxtpx="http://www.garmin.com/xmlschemas/TrackPointExtension/v1"</span> Each track point looks like this: 2014-03-16T20:35:47+00:00 296.20001220703125 86 gpxtpx:TrackPointExtension trkpt  Since the first few exiting GPX converters failed to meet my needs, I decided to make my own, at least partially.

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.

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.

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.