da.SearchCursor ORDER BY SHAPE@AREA

[JamesCrandall]

I'm not having any success sorting an arcpy.da.SearchCursor by the SHAPE Area values.  No errors but it doesn't sort descending from my testing.

Anyone able to confirm this or offer a suggestion?

with arcpy.da.SearchCursor(clip_fc,['SHAPE@AREA','POLYGON_NM'],sql_clause=(None,'ORDER BY SHAPE.STArea() DESC')) as clipcur:
    for cliprow in clipcur:
        areaval = cliprow[0]‍‍‍

[JamesCrandall]

This appears to be one solution:

for cliprow in sorted(arcpy.da.SearchCursor(clip_fc,['SHAPE@AREA','POLYGON_NM']),reverse=True):

‍‍

[JoshuaBixby]

What is your backend database and what geometry storage type is being used?

[JamesCrandall]

1, SQL Server

2. I'm guessing ST_geometry since Shape.STArea() is the name of the area column on polygon FC's.

[JoshuaBixby]

SQL Server doesn't support ST_Geometry.  For SQL Server it will be GEOMETRY or GEOGRAPHY if using native types, or SDEBINARY if using an Esri type.

[JoshuaBixby]

I just tested with ArcMap 10.5 connecting to a 10.4.x enterprise geodatabase in SQL Server, and using a SQL clause works:

>>> with arcpy.da.SearchCursor(r'Database Connections\Default@SGDB@localdb.sde\SGDB.DBO.Infra', ["SHAPE@AREA","OID@"],sql_clause=(None,"ORDER BY SHAPE.STArea() DESC")) as cur:
...     for area,oid in cur:
...     print "{} {}".format(area,oid)
...
39593.1062297 3
26339.7586344 2
20269.7498507 6
8894.95466122 11
8412.44189983 4
8049.8586996 1
7620.10032388 10
7431.46963174 5
6953.70626041 8
6316.28689426 9
6142.45012789 7‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍

[JamesCrandall]

It looks like I implemented the same but the cursor was not sorted as expected!

Edit: I'm on ArcGIS 10.3

[JamesCrandall]

Do you have any comment on the solution I mentioned above?  (It's linked to from the 10.1 documentation under example #5 "sorting Mini-HOW TO" -- which I thought was strange).

[JoshuaBixby · Accepted solution]

sorted is a Python built-in, and your code is following a standard Python pattern.  If it works, great.  A couple of things to think about.

• Sorted returns "a new sorted list from the items in iterable."  In this case, it means your entire cursor will have to be iterated and stored in a new list before sorted sorts it and gives you a list back.  For very large data sets, it may not be desirable to copy the entire cursor into memory.
• Since your cursor is returning more than one field, it would be best for you to specify a key to select the one and only column you are interested in sorting on.  In your current example, you are actually comparing a combination of SHAPE@AREA and POLYGON_NM, whatever the latter is.  For the key, you can either use operator.itemgetter() or define a lambda/anonymous function to select just the area field.

[JamesCrandall]

itemgetter implemented.

Thanks for your input.