Latest Contributions by JoeBryant1

A user of mine recently ran into an issue where they had converted feature labels to an annotation feature class in ArcGIS Pro. After the conversion, they made several edits to the text. Then they found out they need to use these labels in many maps with multiple scales that will be printed in layouts. Instead of creating an annotation feature class at each scale, they would like to convert the edited annotation features to graphics so that they will display at the appropriate size at any map scale. But there is currently no way to convert these annotation features to map graphics in ArcGIS Pro. Would adding the ability to convert annotation to graphics be useful for cases like this (or other cases you can think of)? ... View more

When embedding a Swipe Map in a single slide of a Sidecar layout in ArcGIS StoryMaps, we don't have a quick way for the viewer to identify the titles or content shown on the left and right sides of the map being compared. In regular swipe maps not embedded in a sidecar slide, you can fill out the caption below the map, but this is not an option in the Sidecar layout. The caption is not the perfect solution, but would be an improvement over the current Sidecar layout. I would prefer to have some type of floating title appear above each side of the map to easily identify the content you are comparing on the left with the content being displayed in the right. For instance: "Data from 2000" vs. "Data from 2020". I have tried to use the Legend for this purpose, but in Swipe maps, a single legend is shown on the left side of the map with items from both sides, which requires additional text explanation for the viewer. I am currently adding 2 sketch layers to the maps that display the year as text to get around this issue, but it looks unprofessional. ... View more

As my organization transitions to using Pro for all of our reports, we are bringing along a lot of legacy shapefile and shapefile based workflows. Many of our modelers and scientists use software or python scripts that can only create shapefiles, so we will continue to reference these shapefiles in our ArcGIS Pro projects when creating our reports. Python specifically allows users to create unsupported file and field names with no check to see if they are valid. Pro will open and display most shapefiles even when they have file names that are too long, with unsupported characters in their file names as well as field names. It is not until you get to a particular query/symbology/editing or geoprocessing process that you run into issues, and often the error message produced is generic and does not let you know that bad shapefile naming practices are to blame. For instance, the Project Package tool that zips up an APRX along with all of the files referenced in the maps ("Share Outside Organization") will fail with "General Function Failure" when your project references shapefiles with bad naming, even though the project was functioning normally. Is there currently a way, possibly using Python, to scrape all Data Sources in an APRX and to see if any are shapefiles with unsupported file or field names? I'd like this tool to produce a list of the files at the very least. Ideally it would also tell a user what specifically is unsupported. The logical next tool would take these files and import them into the default project geodatabase, hopefully correcting any of the unsupported naming in the process. ... View more