Latest Contributions by BenCochrane

Hi, I work in the GIS dept. of a local UK council. We support the ArcGIS users within the organisation. We have one particular user who is having an odd issue that I cannot get to the bottom of. When he first loads up ArcMap 10.7.1 on a morning and opens the mxd he typically works from. He had red exclamation marks against some of his layers. This has been an issue for some users whilst home working as sometimes our VPN drops connection to the councils shared drives / databases and its a case of getting then re connected to the VPN.   However, he is working in the office so has a direct connection. Also , if the VPN issue occurs the same drives where data is stored also will no longer be accessible via windows explorer.   From speaking to the user he has stated that all the drives are still accessible via windows explorer. However if he right clicks on a layer with an exclamation mark and tries to repoint or amend the data source , when he navigates to the same drive / folder via "Add Data" or ArcCatalog the folders do not show any loadable data, as if they are empty.   But, from what he has described if he closes the mxd and leaves it in his words "for a while" then goes back and reopens the mxd the layers will then often be present upon reloading. I am at a loss as to why this is happening. Personally I think it is a network issue but the fact that the drives are accessible via windows explorer makes me think our networks team will say its a software issues !!   My final step if I cant get any possible answers here is to completely remove all traces of ArcGIS rom his system and do a full reinstall but that would be my last option.   If anyone can offer and possible advice it ill be much appreciated   thanks   Ben     ... View more

Hi, I work for a local government and we run a number of web services that are used across the organisation. One of the web services is a point feature class showing all the entries into our gazetteer. This layer is updated every night via python scripts created via model builder and ran through task scheduler on our server. There are three parts to this, the first part copies and replaces a table from the SQL database of the gazetter into our  "Vector" SDE database. The second part deletes the current point feature class that is built from this table and recreates a new copy from the table. The third part of this copies the newly created point feature class over onto the server which hosts our web app data. We have a dbo task set up to kill all connections to the "Vector" SDE database to ensure we dont encounter any locks ( this task runs at 5am so is unlikely to have anyone connected but this is an added layer of security ).    If I am doing a manual dataswap I was always follow the practice of stopping the service before copying the new data intothe correct location, rename the existing data with _OLD as backup and it all works fine, I then restart the service. As I cant do this at 5am I have two options... Can the above run and copy rename the data without stopping the service or will this cause issues?   If this is the case, is it possible to stop a particular service via a script in task scheduler and if this is the way to do it , can anyone point me in the correct direction for guidance on stopping /starting tasks via task scheduler?   thanks and I hope the above isnt too long winded and confusing   Ben ... View more

Hi,   I work for a local council in the UK and we have recently had our GIS infrastructure upgraded. I am trying to restore some ArcGIS online public web maps / apps that are now not functioning due to issues with basemaps and other services we have hosted on our new external ArcGIS server. After republishing some services my understanding was that Id go into the layers within ArcGIS online, go to settings and change the URL to reflect the new rest URL in ArcGIS Server Manager. However having done this and saving the changes into the layers on ArcGIS online this is not working as I expected.   The services are all set to public / everyone in their permissions and if I bring these layers back into ArcGIS via add data > Layer from web ina blank map, it works fine, but when I try to open a previously created web map that uses these layers which I have updated with the new URLs the layers fail to load and I just get a blank map. Short of updating the URL in the layers settings I don’t know what else I would / should need to do ??   Im completely out of ideas on this and have been trying for the last few days to no avail.   Any advice would be greatly appreciated. ... View more

Hi, I am setting up a basemap for use on a public facing council website. I am wanting to add a council logo watermark to this basemap and have been following the guide found here ... How To: Add a watermark to a map service  This has worked OK, however I am finding when I zoom into the map to a scale of 1:1500 or below ( >1500 ) The watermark image begins to pixelate and by the time I am zoomed to a scale of 1:400 it is unrecognisable. Can anyone offer any advice on why this would be happening. If I zoom out to a smaller scale ( 1:10,000 for example ) , the watermark appears to rescale itself so it remains a constant size and legibility. I cannot find any settings within the "Picture Fill Symbol" settings to adjust the actual image , so am at a loss as to why the watermark would pixelate, surely it should just be displaying the same referenced imaged on top of the map regardless of what the map scale is?? kind thanks in advance. Ben ... View more

Hi, I am trying to create a JSON file from an existing boundary polygon my organisation uses. I have used the features to JSON tool from the toolbox. however when I look at the text within the JSON file, all the polygon vertices are in XY / easting/northings. I need the JSON files vertices to use lat / long.  How would I go about doing this ?  Any help greatly appreciated, I'm pulling my hair out with this. thanks ... View more

Hi, I am setting up a map for a user in my organisation with the end goal being that she will be able to add / delete / edit the polygons of a layer which has been set up to allow editing of the layer through the Web Map. I have set the feature layer to allow editing and when I open the web map I can click "Edit" on the top toolbar and select the later I wish to edit / add to.  I can draw a polygon in the usual way. However, say for example I wished to remove a vertex or fundamentally alter the shape of the Polygon I find I am unable to. I can select the polygon at which point I get a dashed grey box around the full polygon with squares on the corner of this dashed box which allow me to distort / stretch / rotate the polygon but I cannot figure out how I am able to edit / move / delete the individual vertices I have added to create the polygon... I have found that if I open the feature layer within a map with full editing control, clicking a second time shows all the individual vertices but doing the same thing within a webmap doesnt work the same. Can individual vertices of a polygon be edited through a Web Map or does this have to be done via editing the feature layer? many thanks Ben ... View more

Hi,  I am having issues with a polygon feature class, that a member of my organisation uses to add data to via ArcGIS connector and MasterGov software. When I look at the attribute table for this layer in ArcGIS and scroll towards the bottom, I get the following error message.. Upon clicking OK on this error message and scrolling to the bottom of the table then back to the top, all the information in the tables cells disappears leaving a blank attribute table. However I can click on a record within the table and the map shifts its view to the records polygon and if I identify it with the identify tool, all the records information is still there in the "identify" box. If I sort this attribute table , ascending then descending before scrolling through it, I no longer get the error message, but I now have approximately 50 records missing from the table, ( they are there with blank fields ) if I do not carry out the sort asc / desc. Also, I have tried importing this feature class into a new FGDB, this again gets rid of the error message but it is only importing the records up to a certain point and not the ones which show as blank in the original table. I have discussed this with colleagues and we are all at a loss as to what exactly has gone wrong and how to fix this issue. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated. Ben ... View more