Insert X number of vertices in a line?

anotgrass_cosprings

Does anyone know if it is possible to insert a # of vertices to a line programmatically?  

Basically what I am looking for is a script/code that will take a variable # (from a field I calculate) and insert that many vertices to the line -- placement isn't too important at the moment.

 

In my case:

I have an area, and within that area I might have 4 lines.  I need each of those lines to have the same number of vertices. I have a model that will iterate through my features, find the line with the highest vertex count, store that number, then calculate the difference for the other lines.

 Basic example:

Line 1 has 100 vertices. Line 2 has 95 vertices.  The model will calculate a field to say that Line 2 needs "5" vertices to equal 100. 

Then I need to find a way to insert 5 vertices to that line. 

 

I have thousands of lines I need to do this for, so manually right clicking, and adding a vertex is not a solution. Also, Densify doesn't suit my needs either.

 

I did see this thread on stackexchange - arcgis desktop - Adding vertex set distance from first or last vertex in polyline? - Geographic Information Systems Stack Exchange

but not sure how or if that could even be modified to do what I am looking for.

 

 

DavidSolari

For manual vertex fiddling a good method is to extract the geometry object for each feature like

with arcpy.da.UpdateCursor(my_features, "SHAPE@") as update:
    for row in update:
        geom = row[0]

and then dump the geometry data to JSON by combining the loads function from the standard Python json library with the geometry object's JSON property. Once you're done manipulating the dictionary you get back you can use something like

new_geom = arcpy.AsShape(json_data)

and throw that into your update cursor. You'll probably need a few helper functions to deal with subsets of the JSON structure so you can deserialize individual points/segments as geometry objects without losing your spatial reference info.

As for your specific case, if you just need to add vertices to the lines, you can find the final two vertices in the line, construct a temporary line object from that, then call the line's positionAlongLine method with use_percentage=True to dump out new vertices that won't distort your original feature. No guarantee this'll work for complex segments but it's a starting point. Have fun!