Implemented
Score10860
I'm not a fan of the scrolling blue text that is used to indicate progress of backgrounded geoprocessing.
The reason is that I cannot tell how far progressed the process is.
On some tools there appears to be a percentage complete tacked onto the end of the scrolling tool name but all I am ever able to read of that is a quick flash of the % sign (and no numbers).
When geoprocessing is running in the background what I would like to see is:
The reason is that I cannot tell how far progressed the process is.
On some tools there appears to be a percentage complete tacked onto the end of the scrolling tool name but all I am ever able to read of that is a quick flash of the % sign (and no numbers).
When geoprocessing is running in the background what I would like to see is:
- The tool that is running
- The percentage completion of that tool
Perhaps the solution could be similar to how eclipse deals with background process. They have an icon that shows you processes are occurring in the back ground and you can click onto that icon and it displays a popup window that has a list of active processes with percentages completed.
I like this idea!
@aurorageomatics i really like your idea and think that would be an excelent solution.
Thanks for all the feedback in these Ideas.
I just had another idea regarding GP progress info - an ArcGIS screensaver, which would display the progress window floating slowly around the screen/s whenever a GP process is running and the screensaver kicks in.
A more obvious progress indicator should be used (not necessarily larger, maybe just a red blinking square or something similar) - hopefully with the ability to click to show (and hide) more information about the process that is running, including the ability to immediately stop the process from running.
When the process stops running, it should be more easy to check the geoprocessing progress results. I find that the tool popup box that displays will disappear - I may have walked away from my computer for a lunch break and then won't see the results box. So then I have to go into the geoprocessing menu and choose "results", find my tool results, and click through the various output info headings. It would be more user-friendly if the popup window would include some of the basic completion information such as an obvious message saying "SUCCESS!", start time, end time, warnings, errors, and a link to the full results - and the popup window should stay until I choose to dismiss it. If I am running multiple tools at the same time, I should have multiple popup results boxes.
The message will indicate succes or failure. It will also link you directly to the results window and into the execution of that job if you click it.
Curently we only have the option to keep the popup windows on your screen if an error occurs. In this case you can turn that option on from the Geoprocessing Options.
As mentioned, in 10.1 simply clicking the status bar will open you up directly to the Results window. From here its a right click -> cancel to stop the current execution.
Thank you for the continued comments - they're helpful, keep them coming.
Case in point: Right this very moment I am copying a raster and even with 1 band in raster it goes ahead and very slowly creeps to 100% then resets to 2% then very slowly creeps to 100% then resets to 5% and process keeps going and going. % indicator is doing what exactly? Is it showing me the actual progress or is it showing me what it feels like showing at this time of hour. I can walk away and come back 3 days later and it will display me a message that it completed process in say 3 hours and 2 minutes. Ok fine but why confuse me with a constantly changing % completion indicator that does not reflect actual %. If it takes 3 hours and 2 minutes to complete the process... and I am 1 hour into it then progress bar should be about 30% don't you think?
Even results bar is not entirely intuitive. It says Executing: CopyRaster........ On top of the tool thing it tells me Computer statistics and histogram. Ok fine... but why does my marquee still says its copying?
I love the fact that I can run processes in the background but by taking away "work on one thing at a time" geoprocessing method you always have to double and tripple guess wheter what you asked computer to do is actually happening.
This is what I want to see (ideally).
Executing clip raster. (estimated total completion time: 18 minutes)
Now clipping red band (estimated completion time 3minutes)
Now clipping green band (estimated completion time 3minutes)
Now clipping blue band (estimated completion time 3minutes)
Now computing histogram and statistics on red band (estimated completion time 3minutes)
Now computing histogram and statistics on green band (estimated completion time 3minutes)
Now computing histogram and statistics on blue band (estimated completion time 3minutes)
After which I would like to see some sort of result window that tells me how effective my computer is at doing this very tool. If it finishes it within estimated time-beautiful but if it says estimated 18 mins and actual turns out to be 3 hours.... I would like to know why...
low on memory? image not optimized? Settings wrong?
Something...
It is to the point that I have to have ArcCatalog open and click on Geoprocessing/Results to actually WATCH and see what is going on, or if it actually started/completed.
clip... clip... clip... clip... clip... clip... = hey mom... hey mom... hey mom... hey mom... hey mom... hey mom...
What?!
There was an error. Your hour long wait for the tool to complete has been wasted.
- every running tool or process needs to have a percent complete indication. If I've been running a tool for an hour, how much more does it need to progress before it's completed; am I 5% completed or 95%. I can't decide whether to cancel the tool and figure out a better way to get my work done, or wait for the tool to complete!
My comment here is only to complain about the developer's lack of testing when they are designing these new features. Seriously, does no one at ESRI use the tools like people in the real world do? It is obvious that when this was tested, people ran tools with minimum processing time (like 30 seconds) so having access to the percentage completed did not matter to them. People who actually use this software need to multitask and need to know how much has been completed. So, we are stuck with not knowing the completion percentage, or if you do want to know the completion percentage, you are not able to do any other work in ArcGIS....
This is a no brainer, but I'm not shocked to see this will not be addressed until at least the next major release - if they can be bothered to fix it then. Who knows maybe they will make another 'design' improvement that could somehow be worse....
As of this moment it has over 11 thousand points, 26 comments, and 10 merged ideas. Come on, tell us what's going on.
Totally backup this suggestion. a percentage number and a coloured progress bar is all it takes to give the info needed
It's totally useless. Gives no indication of what it's doing, percentages are hardly ever seen and mostly inaccurate, and as others have said, sometimes freezes or does not even appear for some time after starting, leading you to think the process has crashed.
Personally I just leave the results box open somewhere on my desktop so I can see what it is doing and if any errors have occurred.
I suppose you could open AppData\Roaming\ESRI\Desktop[VERSION#]\ArcToolbox\History\[SESSIONID].xml in an autoupdating reader like Notepad++ if you like a really crunchy approach.
The status says 'Implemented', is there anyway for one to find out at what version this is becoming available?