Latest Contributions by DeanCarstens

It's only when the Python interpreter process is killed that the locks release. That means I cant restore the data without exiting the script runner. I've been trying to find a way to either run the tool on a seperate python process or somehow remove the locks but I cant seem to solve the problem. Any ideas? This is just a shot in the dark, but have you tried deleting arcpy, having the script wait a bit and then loading it again and continuing?  You can try this by using a timer for the delay. I haven't treid this myself, so I'm not sure whether deleting arcpy will remove the locks, but it's worth a try. ... View more

Hi Tony, You can do this using the MessageBox in the pythonaddins module.  Pass the coordinates to the message property as text. ... View more

Thanks for the replies. That's what I'm currently trying.  I'm using shutil.rmtree to delete the entire folder.  When there are no .lock in the folder, it works fine, but if there are, then it'll start deleting some of the files in the folder and fall over on the files those locks are holding on to as well as the lock files themselves.  This then leaves the whole GDB useless and a headache to try and get the last files deleted.  Because ArcGIS can't access the GDB anymore, to refresh and successfully release that lock, it's an absolute mission to get rid of them.  I had to wait for a server restart the last time, which meant that users had no access to the database. As a fallback I've thought about checking for lock files first, then using the Python sleep function to delay any processing and rechecking until the lock files are gone and then deleting the FGB, before starting the export from SDE to the FGDB.  The problem is that if someone does have their machine on overnight, then it'll mean that this check will run into the next day and as the export takes a few hours to create and copy over the network, it'll mean that users might not have any database for a few hours the following day.  I could of course add something that says, if the checks go past a certain time, then abort it.  Then just have this task run daily and check for the time it was last run to make sure it's not updating it too frequently. Anyway, having the ability to just delete the database, will save me a lot of time and effort.  I'm really not concerned about the applications that have connections to it.  The ArcMap sessions they have connected are read only and frankly, they have been told not to keep them active overnight.  Everyone's happy with this arrangement, but you do get people just plainly forgetting. ... View more

Cheers Joshua, In the end I simply used the extents of my properties as the 'grid'.  In the old map books tool it built a grid for you and I was probably still in that mindset.  The data driven pages have loads of new functions built in, so it's really been very helpful. Dean ... View more