Better "Select by .." dialogs

514
3
07-12-2012 06:53 PM
Status: Open
SimonNeville
New Contributor II
I would love to see the ability to create multiple Select by Attribute dialogs when attribute updates etc. But I recognise it may be tricky.
 
So a suggested new feature for selection dialogs:
 
Forward/backwards buttons to go back to previous (applied) selection (including Layer, method, and selection syntax). Would save heaps of time!
 
All that would be required is to save the state of the previous selection while the tool is open.
3 Comments
DavidKnudsen
I like this idea, but I worry about the RAM/file space that could end up being consumed. I work with data sets of several hundred thousand records, and though the time savings in just recalling a previous selected set would be correspondingly greater, Imagine how the file size could balloon after I had made forty or fifty selections on that set...

Maybe it's manageable, but if not, at least being able to store the history of the selection criteria would be great. I think that has been suggested elsewhere.
Gerald_Daumiller

ArcMap automatically saves your most recent selection criteria and shows it again when you re-open the Select by Attribute window during the same session.  I would like at least to see this functionality restored.  Actually, ArcMap saves the most recent query for every layer that you have made a query in using the "Select by Attribute" feature from each table window, plus the most recent query from the general "Select by Attribute" window.

If a query history were implemented, I would be satisfied if it applied to the current session only, rather than saving every query you have made or every query in each project.

I am thinking of remembering just the query, rather than remembering the selection that resulted. Remembering the selection might be nice also, because then you could get back to that selection faster, and it would still give you the same records, even if some of them had been edited to no longer satisfy the query.  But it would be confusing to explain this to the user.

Gerald_Daumiller

I was just looking back over my old posts.  I noticed that the ArcMap behavior seems to have been implemented for this idea.  Thanks!