Latest Contributions by MichaelVolz

I have just detected another problem with out-of-date services that you can test yourself as well.  Some GIS users added ArcIMS services from public sites such as USGS which I believe required credentials.  At this point in time, the service has been retired.  This causes my python script to hang on these mxds for about 20 minutes (very problematic if my batch of mxds is over 500 files). To try to solve this problem, I opened this file in ArcMap and deleted this service and then saved the mxd.  When I re-opened the saved mxd, I was still getting a dialog box asking for the ArcIMS service credentials even though I deleted this service.  I then repaired the mxd with MxdDoctor which finally solved the problem. Why would ArcMap hold on to any part of the retired ArcIMS service if I deleted it from the mxd and subsequently saved the mxd without any reference to this retired ArcIMS service? ... View more

ListMapServices appears to generate a list of all mapservices that are hosted on a specific server.  That does not appear to help this situation as you would want a different ListMapServices that would list all the mapservices found in an ArcMap document using their original name and not the name that appears in the TOC. ... View more

Randy: At the least it seems like this is a new idea for ideas.arcgis.com to access a mapservice name (not the TOC name that can change) with python scripting as it does not seem possible at this point. ... View more

Randy: I would log an incident with ESRI at this point because their documentation is misleading at best.  If you are on a LAN, then you should have received a Null value but you got the URL without the service name.  If you are not on the LAN, then you should have received the URL including the service name but you did not get the service name in the URL.  The documentation that I referred to is for arcpy's mapping module which should be exposed in python. ... View more

According to documentation for layer in v10.1, the URL should get you the name of the service as this is part of the URL, unless it is through a LAN.  Are you working on a LAN when processing this script? The URL for this documentation is: http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.1/index.html#//00s300000008000000 Go to the area Keys for a web service dictionary. Please let me know if this helps. My organization has decided to avoid using services in mxds (especially outside services) as you never know when they will be retired which would cause broken links as you are experiencing. ... View more

In regards to ArcMap maintenance it would be good if the user had the option of either embedding the SDE credentials in the mxd or using .sde files outside the mxd to create the necessary SDE connections.  This could mean the difference between updating a few .sde files as opposed to thousands or more SDE connections inside mxd files. Please vote at the following location: http://ideas.arcgis.com/ideaView?id=087E00000004wTD&returnUrl=%2Fapex%2FideaList%3Fc%3D09a300000004xET%26category%3D%26p%3D2%26sort%3Drecent ... View more

I would think you could create a lyr file from a service as my organization has a few lyr files like this.  I believe the only problem with this method is if the mapservice exists in a group layer as you need to know the index of the layer inside the group layer if you want it to maintain its visibility with respect to the other layers in the group layer.  This might not be the case, so it would need to be tested. ... View more

Matt: You are probably right about not being able to replace the datasource.  I would try to use the UpdateLayer method, but this might not be possible because the source might already be broken. You would need to know what the starting layer is so you know what layer to replace it with if you have multiple mapservices to choose from.  This would be important if you had many mapservices that were retired at once and replaced with newer mapservices. The UpdateLayer method is how I converted raster images sourced from SDE with raster mosaic datasets sourced from a mapped network location. ... View more

This is definitely going to be a problem.  Is there anyway you can restore the old mapservices again, so you can run a python script to remove and/or replace these mapservices?  Can you have both versions of ArcGIS Server running at the same time or did you upgrade in place?  This would be a reason why you would want to build new servers when you upgrade your ArcGIS Server environment. ... View more

GISDEV01: Is my request possible in the FlexViewer application? ... View more

Can anyone from ESRI answer this question? I am currently running a similar script in v10.0 where it is not possible.  Once this script has processed all my organization's mxds and lyr files, I will be upgrading my enterprise GIS environment to v10.2.  I will need to run this script again in the v10.2 environment when my organization upgrades our SDE Oracle database from 11g to 12c, so this capability would be useful if it is now available at v10.2. ... View more

Thanks Kevin.  Your second link did the trick. ... View more

Kevin: Your link brings me to an ESRI website that shows no matches.  Can you check the link and resend if necessary?  Thanks. ... View more

Besides the overwrite issue, has anyone been able to get this automated process to work in v10.2? Can you get this automated process to work on a brand new service where there is no overwrite to be done? ... View more