Latest Contributions by DanEvans

Hi, I've written a geoprocessing script in Arcpy v10.2 that merges contiguous polylines into multipart polylines. At the moment it can take an SQL expression as an input that selects certain features of the input feature class to apply the algorithm to (e.g. I only want to merge intersecting pipes if they operate at the same pressure range, so I'd use the selection query to only select pipes of that pressure range). I'm trying to modify this so instead of a selection query, you can select multiple fields from the input feature class, similar to the Dissolve tool. So for example, I could merge all intersecting pipes of the same material, diameter, and pressure range into separate, contiguous, multi-part polyline features. I'm struggling to find a good way to identify all the unique combinations of values for the selected fields, and loop through each of these combinations, selecting them in turn and applying the algorithm to each of those selections. The usual way to get unique values from one field is to add all the values to a list and then convert it into a set, but this gets tricky when you instead have multiple fields and you don't know how many fields the user will select! It doesn't seem possible to convert a list of lists to a set, as a set won't accept a list as an element as it's mutable. If I try converting the inner lists to tuples I get an error about tuples not being callable. Generally the code I've written to try to achieve this is a hacked together mess! There has to be a better way of doing this! Can anyone suggest how I can do this? Finally, once I have each combination in a list (or maybe a dictionary, with the field name as the key?) is there a nice/efficient way to generate a SQL query to select the features with that combination of values? Thanks Dan ... View more