topic Re: symbol name as field value in Data Management Questions

symbol name as field value

BartDe_Bruyn — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 08:25:59 GMT

I have been working on a symbolisation based on the values in different fields. Now I should like to define a new field based on the symbols I use in the symbolisation. Is this possible ??
I am using arcgis 10.
It's okay if I have a different number for each symbol.

thanks in advance for your suggestions.

Re: symbol name as field value

AlexeyTereshenkov — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 15:41:48 GMT

Hi,

Do you mean that you want to combine values from multiple fields into one value in one field? Say you have field A and field B.

A B
45 66
56 77
67 88

Do you want to create a new field C which would have something like this:

A B C
45 66 "45/66"
56 77 "56/77"
67 88 "67/88"

?

Or you mean that you have used various symbols for various features (I guess based on some attribute) and now you want to calculate a new field which would have values based on the symbol used for this feature (green circle will be "123" and black square will be "456")? In this case, you do not have to bother with symbols at all since the symbology in ArcMap is always attribute-driven. This is because you have to differentiate features based on their properties (it could either non-spatial attributes (properties) or geometrical properties like area, length, etc.)

Re: symbol name as field value

BartDe_Bruyn — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 20:41:08 GMT

Hi,

Do you mean that you want to combine values from multiple fields into one value in one field? Say you have field A and field B.

A B
45 66
56 77
67 88

Do you want to create a new field C which would have something like this:

A B C
45 66 "45/66"
56 77 "56/77"
67 88 "67/88"

?

Or you mean that you have used various symbols for various features (I guess based on some attribute) and now you want to calculate a new field which would have values based on the symbol used for this feature (green circle will be "123" and black square will be "456")? In this case, you do not have to bother with symbols at all since the symbology in ArcMap is always attribute-driven. This is because you have to differentiate features based on their properties (it could either non-spatial attributes (properties) or geometrical properties like area, length, etc.)

Your last calculation is the one I want to do. I want to give values based on the symbol used for each feature.
But it is rather difficult to gather all the value combinations for each symbol
symbol1: A=45 B=b, A=45 B=c, A=45 B=e, A=66 B=f
symbol2: A=36 B=<space>, A=36 B=k, ........

I know that my method was very bad, but my map image is correct now....

Is it possible to calculate automatically a new field C with:
feature 1: symbol 1, C=123
feature 2: symbol 2, C=456
feature 3: symbol 1, C=123
and so on ...

Is this possible in ArcGIS? In ArcInfo workstion It is possible, something like:
arcedit: calculate <field> $symbol

But here I have no workstation commands..

Re: symbol name as field value

AlexeyTereshenkov — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 20:56:47 GMT

Bart,

Got it. Hm, I thought a bit but have nothing to suggest except doing some manual work. You could use the Select by Attribute in ArcMap to select interactively features that meet a certain condition (those you used to create different categories for the symbology) and then use the Field Calculator to calculate a certain value in a newly added field.
I hope there are not so many symbol categories so you could do that in timely manner 🙂 let's wait though - maybe someone else has brighter ideas 🙂