Latest Contributions by OskarErdödy

This Articles' only purpose is to bash ArcMap for several Problems, some of them old, some of them new. Administrators feel free to put this anywhere it should be - I have no time to visit those thousands of themes and communities and whatever. You may put it in the trash, I don't care, I will repost. If any problem I mention here got a solution in 10.7., take it simply as not mentioned 😉 1st Problem: This "GeoNet" is now existing for a while and it seems to be existing in this hardly comprehensible structure just as a hindrance to post proper comments on proper places. If one can live in it and with it, fine. But I see it as a method to reduce complaints. As I am at work, I cannot spend hours to explore this community. I have to be fast and efficient. 2nd Problem: Old. ArcMap (I am on 10.6.1) did not allow certain lengths of filenames, certain characters in filenames, each level and kind of allowance seems to be different with the team that created the respective tool. It should now, since ArcMap "has been rewritten in Version 10", for all tools be the same, and all tools should be able to overwrite files that are at least not in use. Since we aren't such idiots that aren't able to honor a warning. But ArcMap quite resists those hopes. 3rd problem: Newer: ArcMap began to become slow in 10.4. but now in 10.6. it is very slow. I do not talk about the Font problem in dialogs, beginning with 10.4 or 10.5 (which needed complaints by many users, many useless tips, and many months until it was solved after the release of 10.6). Meanwhile, someone decided to give multiple TOC redraws, together with multiple feature redraws a try. Why not making a GIS slower if it isn't already slow enough ? 4th problem: Older: I don't know when ArcMap began to confirm a successful execution of a geoprocessing tool, but didn't execute anything. I think it was in 10.3 or 10.4. You start a tool, it executes successfully, and if you search for a resulting change (i.e. a new shapefile or so), you find nothing. Great idea, folks ! I like to be pranked professionally ! To save Esris' honor, after a restart/reload of the map or ArcMap, this may (or may not) work (simply recall the procedure from history). 5th problem: Older. When I open a tool, say 3d-Analysts' "Add Surface Information", I select the Input feature Class and the Input Surface. If one of those features is in a group (as 99.9 percent of my feature classes are) , the execution of the tool could fail (if it doesn't show a successful execution where it didn't do anything, see 4th problem). I have to locate the features with their correct paths then, in order to hope for a successfull execution. To restart the map or ArcMap itself usually doesn't help here . 6th problem: Old: The positioning of TOC, Toolbox, and other bigger elements is a pain with those Auto-Snap-Placers appearing immediately. Could not anyone invent an easier method helping with that monsters layout ? And to save the complete layout, as it tooks time to configure it, and after a fresh installation, it is gone. 7th problem: Old: It happens so often that you need to overwrite or simply, for instance, change a shapefile. Now, it is understandable that there are certain problems with changing files while they are in use. So one may think, let's remove the file from TOC, and then overwrite or change it. But no, that doesn't work. ArcMap leaves all kind of file locks (some of them magically inside an excel file !) until ArcMap is shut down. Yes, it isn't enough to open a new Map, some file locks survive even that. 8th problem: Old: ArcMap has great functionality and great sense for styling, but the problem with sometimes eight or more levels of click-through (f.i. Properties / Labels / Symbol / Edit symbol / Advanced Text / Text Background Properties / Balloon Callout Symbol / Edit Symbol Line Fill Symbol Line  / Edit Symbol / Cartographic Line Decorations Properties / Line Decoration Symbol / Edit Symbol / Arrow Marker Symbol Mask Symbol / Edit Symbol / Marker Fill Symbol Marker / Edit Symbol / Mask Symbol / Edit Symbol / ...... 18th Level that was) is waiting for a horizontal short-cut for years now. 9th problem: Old: No .bak files of any kind. 10th problem: Old: Pdf-Transparency !! Yes, transpacency in pdf exists for a very long time now. But Arcmap renders every feature that got a transparency as a raster, and every feature under this, also. That leads to huge pdf's, when vector content has to be shown properly and therefore the raster resulution needs to be enhanced.  Many users aren't aware of that, and many are wondering why a small map results in a huge pdf. There is even a catch: If ArcMap decides that the map is complex, rasterization can affect even "higher" (in terms of z-order) placed layers. Then we have to create a vector group, and a raster group, where both types are completely separeted from each other. But why isn't there a pdf-transparency option ? Boys and Girls, yes, it IS possible. 11th problem: Old: At some point of complexity, both Maplex and the Standard label engine are giving up their good work. You then can create levels and rules, it doesn't matter. Labels are drawn....not following the rules anymore. As if Maplex is lying on the ground and says to us, please...I am done....But however !! It leads us to the 12th problem: Old: Why can't I simply place manually the labels I need to place manually ? Why do I have to create a  Annotation Feature Class, and why, oh why is it so complicated to change its reference scale afterwards ?  Why is the bounding box of individual overriden Lables in an AFC changing, or better aske, why isn't the bounding box, where the label shows up, anymore ? (I know it, but the explanation is kind of rude). 13th problem: Newer: Performance again. ArcMap seems not to take advantage of CAD graphics cards. But ArcMap also seems to become slower and slower (taking minutes for start, with or without loading maps), with growing lag after opening tools, and the tendency is disturbing. We have several Dell Precisions here with Xeon1545 and 32 GB RAM, and it seems that ArcMap gets faster slow than the hardware can evolve. That wasn't alwas alike, as I remember (I began with 8.0). ... View more

Finally someone found a way to even make simple product discussions complicated. I didn't find the right Community-Sub-Sub-Sub-Sub group, so I landed me here. I am not eager to get a degree in Esri community participation management. Admin feel free to move my post to the right place. I am on ArcGis Desktop 10.6.1. vulgo Arcmap on a borrowed license. I borrowed it via Arcgis Administrator and then worked with it. I also had the Extension '3d-Analyst' activated, but not borrowed, because I do not always need it during the borrowing time of the main product. So far so good, that worked as expected, but today I had no Internet (also as I expected) and Arcmap lost the connection to the License server. I didn't think that would be a problem, because it's only the extension and not Arcmap itself, which was still borrowed. But after those five tries of reaching the LS for '3d-Analyst', guess what, Arcmap terminated itself !!!! What ? - It terminates because the License of the extension was not found ? And we have 2018, not 1993 ! Yep, it did. Luckily i saved my map before Arcmap vanished (of course with no option to save my work). I think that is not what an application this expensive should do. It literally says 'Hey, we appreciate your tens of thousands of Euros, but no, for a halfway decent license managing process we are too lazy.' I bet it's still not possible to mix a single local license with shared extensions. ... View more

Hi, this is a question I should have asked a long time ago. In Arcgis 10.4 the DWG/DXF Import with "Add Data" does not create the same results als in 10.1 (or 10.0). The blocks/inserts are not graphically converted, only as points. On the other hand, every Block gets its own point-feature, which can lead to several thousand features in a huge group, and therefore to a very long insertion time. The "Cad To Database" tool has the same problem, takes significantly more time and additionally often generates "Error 00354: The name contains invalid characters". For larger drawings (for instance, plants in engineering are mostly made of inserts), I have to explode those blocks (and nested inserts), which can take a very long time, losing block informations like Layer, Block name, Attributes. Am I missing something ? How could I import Dwg/Dxf like with the old (not perfect, but more usable) mode ? ... View more

I am using Arcmap 10.4 with 3d-Analyst on Windows 7 / 64 bit with 32G RAM. Background processing is enabled and 32-Bit (for some reasons). I used the Function "Interpolate shape" with a 32-Bit-floatingpoint-raster surface datset in a file gdb, and a point shape. The raster surface is quite (spatial) big; in the properties it says it's uncompressed size is 56GB, but because of it being composed of about 500 small islands (corresponding to 500 points in the shape) of data, and the rest are empty cells, it's not a big dataset. The operation failed at first with "Error 000229: cannot open [resulting shapefile name]"., though the resulting shapefile was created, but empty (no geometry). I tried then to create the feature class in a database, but with the same result. After some thinking what I could have done wrong, I shutted down ArcMap (like many years ago when something alike happened), and restarted it, and loaded my map again. Then I deleted the faulty shapefile from the result before, and restarted the operation directly from the results, which succeeded. It seems that there is a memory problem ? Even if the calculations are done in an own process outside Arcmap ? - I had 10.1 on an 8 GB machine for a long time, and I cannot remember something like that happening, maybe with 10.0, but for sure before, in the 9.x times. If the 32-Bit-background-processing would be responsible, I could understand it, if the operation never succeeds, but it does, yet just after a reboot of Arcmap. ... View more

First I have to say, it's not easy to orient myself in this forum, despite I am quite familiar with forums. In this I feel lost. So I put my text simply here, feel free to move it to a 3d-Analyst subtheme (which I didn't find). I am on ArcMap 10.4 Standard, with 3d-Analyst. Arcmap itself has the "Identify"-tool, and when you click somewhere in the map, where is a raster dataset with elevation information (32-Bit floating point, for instance) present, you get back height information from that layer, which is the cell value of the raster pixel located there. So far, so good. With 3d-Analyst, you have the two functions "Add Surface Information" and "Interpolate shape", where one can transfer elevation data from a surface like the raster dataset I mentioned, to a shapefile, either as information in the data table ("Add Surface Information") or directly as a new z-enabled feature class. Recently I detected some differences between results from those 3d-Analyst-operations and results from the tool. This means, I have a point shapefile where surface information was added, but when I click on some of the points with the identify tool, the elevation from the source raster is not the same as the points got from the 3d-analyst operation, however near I zoom in. Of course the underlying raster dataset is always the same. For the kind of surface I use, 3d-Analyst forces me to use bilinear Interpolation, although I rather want to use linear, or the method Arcmap itself uses to "Identify", which would be simply the value of the underlying cell. In the cases I have, I do not need any interpolation, because manually going through the results shows differences between what's there in the dataset, and how it was calculated. So I kindly ask the developers (and the community if you have a way to come around this) to either enhance the "identify" tool, or to provide a non-interpolated mode for the 3d-Analyst functions, since restricting the bilinear interpolation via reducing the "sampling distance" to a very small fraction of the raster cell size does not work as expected. ... View more