Create Query from List

Question

There are several variations on this out there but all are use the OID/FID of the FC to create the query. I'd like to modify this to accommodate a different field which is still an integer value. The thing is arcpy.Describe makes it damn easy to get a list of FIDs. Am I missing something here or am I going to have to build a list by other means? I do realize you could use a loop to create a super long query using 'OR' but given that the attribute values are integer, I see no reason to use 'IN' for this. Here's some code: import arcpy #Assumes the layer in ArcMap has a selected features lyr = arcpy.mapping.Layer("yourLayer") lyrDesc = arcpy.Describe(lyr) fieldDesc = lyrDesc.FIDset selectedList = fieldDesc.split(";") #Build your query; the below is poor since it assumes "OBJECTID" is present; this is a draft sql = "{} IN ({})".format("OBJECTID", ", ".join([str(n) for n in selectedList])) #Apply the definition query lyr.definitionQuery = sql‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍

ZacharyHart · Answer

I found a real simple way to do this: #Function to build list def UniqueValues(table, field): with arcpy.da.SearchCursor(table, [field]) as cursor: return sorted({row[0] for row in cursor})‍‍‍‍ Should I just delete this question all together? I don't want to clutter up the forum.