stuck on the route editing tool. When I try to use make route, it states that there are no acceptable targets

[gregtides]

Hello! I am biologist who has been teaching himself how to use arcmap. My place of employment just gave me a simple task, create a map of a river, and find distances between sites that were sampled along the river. They provided written instructions, and I would like to complete the task over the weekend. ' Right now I am stuck on the route editing tool. When I try to use make route, it states that there are no acceptable targets, make route creates m aware polylines. Can anyone provide me the solution to this problem? I acquired flowline data from NHD, which I have been using as the base for my map.

[TedKowal]

Making routes is pretty basic....  when issuing the make route command do you have the set of polylines selected? (ones that will become the route)

[gregtides]

Thank you, your advice was wasn't helpful with my problem, but I appreciate

that you at least took the time to engage with a novice at Arc. I figured

the issue out on my own eventually.

Thank you for your time.

Geoff

[TedKowal]

I am sorry and from your description of your problem, I do not know where you are stuck?  Typically, when I get summer interns and they try and create routes (m aware lines); it is because they do not have a line segment selected upon which to create the route (most common type of problem).

ESRI does have help here: About using ArcMap to create routes from existing lines—Help | ArcGIS for Desktop   From my interpretation of your problem you are trying to create routes(m aware line)  based upon the rivers linework.

Hope this helps you figure it out!

[gregtides]

I figured out my issue when I was able to get into the lab and pull up some

of their existing data. While I was working on my program at home I was

working with a polyline shapefile that I found myself on the usgs website.

I suspected that was part of my issue, since it was specifying m awareness

in the error message. When I worked on arc at my lab I was using polyline

zm data, that seemed to fix the problem that I was running into. Looking

back I might have able to circumvent the problem if I tried creating a

route with the data I pulled from the internet using create routes in the

linear referencing tools. I was pretty zeroed in on following the

instructions that I was given from my supervisor though, and it wasn't till

I was exploring the zm polyline shapefile that it occurred to me to that I

hadn't tried that.

Sorry if the previous message was vague, I appreciate this dialogue, and I

am really excited to be making and using a map form data that I collected!

This has been a personal goal for a long time, since arcgis started showing

up on job fliers a lot after I graduated form college.

Geoff

[TedKowal]

Sometimes working out the problem for your self is the best path in learning. 

I generally use create routes from the linear referencing tools and my comments where under the assumption you were doing the same.  I am glad you were able to resolve your problems.