Enable tools to operate recursively

359
1
06-10-2010 12:22 PM
Status: Open
KeithAdlam
New Contributor III

Give all tools where appropriate the ability to be used recursively on a directory tree of folders.
For example for creating spatial indexes, setting projections, appending featureclasses etc. For non file based workspaces tools should be able to be applied to all datasets in the workspace or a selection of datasetes defined by a string containing a wild card character or characters.

I know that some of this can be done using the batch command but it is a bit cumbersome and it is very slow to populate
the batch grid if large numbers of datasetsare involved. Also naming the output for some tool is problematic and involves manualy populating the grid because the fill option is not appropriate..

Other examples that spring to mind are:
1. Clip all featureclass in a workspace and output the results to a new workspace
2. Resample all rasters in a workspace and output the results to a new workspace

1 Comment
by Anonymous User

python perhaps? For people that have not used Fill, it can populate values down the list if you're doing the same thing for all features (right-click, FIll, on a cell). It would be neat if it could auto-complete filenames but adding a successive suffix though or something. Adding many featureclasses.... You can drag a large amount of feature classes (from the table of contents or Catalog) and drag into the Batch, too and it adds them all. Just saying this for anyone that didn't know. I discovered these 'by accident' while batching.  Now I recently took the Python Esri class and I'm brand new to python, but I bet it could be helpful.   But yes it'd be nice if Esri automated this and built it into Arc though.