Latest Contributions by StephenLead

I just learnt this incredibly useful trick: if you rename an *.MSD file to be *.zip, you can open it up in WinZip and see the component *.XML files. This allowed me to debug a complicated problem involving incorrect data paths - hard to do in the dark, but simple once I knew where to look. ESRI - could we have an official viewer which allows us to do this legitimately? ... View more

I'm seeking some advice on best practices for handling datasets with hundreds of attributes. (I made a typo in the subject of this thread - the attributes would be part of the featureclass, not joined to it.) I'm building some polygon featureclasses from raw census tables, which contain hundreds of fields. I'd like to leave all of the attributes on the featureclasses (rather than stripping off the ones I don't currently need), so I can be flexible about which attributes to show at a later date. Does anyone have any advice on how this will affect performance? 1) is it a bad idea to have a file geodatabase featureclass with hundreds of attributes? 2) is it a bad idea to create a map service from this featureclass, containing hundreds of attributes? 3) is there a performance implication if I build a featureLayer in the JS API, and only specify the attributes I currently need? eg, the map service might contain 500 attributes, but I define my feature layer using featureLayer.fields = [x, y, z] Thanks for any advice, and please let me know if you need any further details. Steve ... View more

Off-topic - there are some sample questions from the Esri Developer Certification exam posted at http://downloads2.esri.com/campus/downloads/certification/samplequestions/EWDA10_Sample_Questions.pdf The reason I hate multiple choice questions is that you can't reason with the computer which marks them. I'd dispute the 1st and 3rd questions: A developer is creating a Web application that allows the user to type in their address and locate it on the map. Which service does the developer need to publish? The answer given is a geocoding service - but the developer doesn't "need to publish a geocoding service". - The developer could use a published geocoding service provided by someone else (eg Bing). - The developer could publish a feature service, and use a query. This is what we used at http://atlas.nsw.gov.au/public/nsw/home/map/base.html in the Find Location search (top right) since it allowed us to use type-ahead, which isn't available using a geocoding service How should a developer show more information when a user hovers over a client-side graphic? Call me a pedant, but there isn't a single correct way to do this, and the correct question is "how could..." OK rant over, back to work now. ... View more

In Graduated Color or Graduated Symbol symbology, ArcMap allows you to set the Label to read whatever you want, rather than exactly what is shown in the Values column.   The problem is that the slightest change to ANY value in the Range column completely obliterates all of the other labels, potentially wasting a huge amount of time. Eg, if I change the first Range value to be 250001 this is the result: The logic should be that the Label is set to the Range when the Classification is first set (including on layer creation) but thereafter, any changes to the Label field are made by the user only, not automatically. ... View more

If you like the idea of out-of-the-box point clustering in the JavaScript API, please vote at http://ideas.arcgis.com/ideaView?id=08730000000bmm4 This would be preferable to using an unsupported clustering sample from the web. Thanks, Steve ... View more