Latest Contributions by RJSunderman

You would not normally need to do this, but to convince myself that I do indeed have the correct username and password for the ArcGIS Server windows service I have gone so far as to stop the AGS service, edit the service"?s properties to change the "?Log On"? to an invalid password, verify that the service will not start, then restore the "?Log On"? properties to what I believe the username and password ought to be and verify that I can restart the ArcGIS Server service. Once I have verified that I have the correct username and password, I"?ve always been able to authenticate as part of the GeoEvent Processor installation wizard. My own experience and that of folks I"?ve helped is normally that we think we have the correct password when in fact we don"?t. Is the user running your ArcGIS Server windows service a local user (default is "?arcgis"?)? Does the local user"?s password have any special characters:  < > / : ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( )  ? ... View more

Hey Matt - What I would recommend is that you publish the data you want GeoEvent Processor to be able to edit to your local ArcGIS for Server with the 'Feature Access' capability toggled on so that you have both a 'Map Service' and a 'Feature Service'. Then you can register your Server connection with GEP and configure a GeoEvent Service to add or update features. From your AGOL account you then 'Add Item' > 'On the web' and provide the URL to your local Server's Map Service. For example:[HTML]http://localhost:6080/arcgis/rest/services/SampleWorldCities/MapServer/0[/HTML] This way, AGOL should not allow you to toggle editing capability on the "republished" map service. Public consumers accessing the data through AGOL shouldn't be able to make any edits, and AGOL administrators shouldn't be able to accidentally edit the feature data. Now, if your ArcGIS for Server site is within a DMZ, this may become a network topology issue. You may need to install and configure the Web Adapter to provide a publicly accessible URL for AGOL to use when accessing the map service you have hosted locally. Is this approach viable for you? - RJ ... View more

Hello Vassilo, No, there is no easy way to do what I think you are wanting to do, for two reasons: 1) At the 10.2.0 release the input connector you are most likely using (Text/TCP) does not support ASCII space characters as field delimiters. We expanded the adapter for this connector at 10.2.1 to add support for using any unicode character as a field delimiter, but unless you have some influence over the feed provider and can get the data as comma separated values (for example) you will have trouble at 10.2.0 getting the day/month/year/hour/minute/second values as separate Integer values. 2) The feed currently has separate values for "months" and "days". Using a Field Calculator you can add a number of milliseconds (as a Long) to a value from a Date field to compute a relative value. For example, the expression DateTime + (8 * 3600 * 1000) would add "8 hours worth of milliseconds" to the value currently in the field DateTime, advancing the value by eight hours. The problem is that there is no easy way to adding N months to a Date value using the Field Calculator. You would have to lookup the number of days in each month and count up the total number of days in however many months you have ... and then add "NN days worth of milliseconds" to an established Date value. We are looking for common functions needed in Field Calculator. A DateAdd() Function like what is found in Visual Basic might be useful here. It would be helpful if you could visit http://ideas.arcgis.com/ and post the ideas you have for GeoEvent Processor. The more votes a particular idea gets the easier it is to prioritize an enhancement. When you do post an idea, please be sure to enter "GeoEvent Processor" as a tag value and check the 'ArcGIS Server' category. This will help route the idea to the team. Best Regards - RJ ... View more

I've been told that in the next update to ArcGIS Online, the map viewer will support a configurable refresh interval. You might look for that capability and use AGOL to view a web map rather than relying on a Flex-based map viewer. If you can live with a user needing to pan or zoom to force a display refresh, I suppose that's another option, but I don't have any good high-level suggestions for avoiding the display flicker/flash when you need to frequently and programmatically refresh feature layers to update a map display. I know that the Operations Dashboard was developed using the Windows WPF SDK for ArcGIS Runtime. That choice of development platform may be what's providing the ability to smoothly update features on the display, but I really don't know. That development is handled by another team; if you're interested I can probably find someone who can discuss the technical implementation. Every other client application map viewer I've seen tends to flicker or flash when the feature layers are updated. There are techniques a developer can use to "blit" graphics from a secondary buffer into a primary graphics buffer. Basically you're building an image from the feature data and then copying a prerendered image to the graphics buffer being used by the viewer. That's really low-level graphics manipulation though, not something that you'd be able to do using one of the Web APIs, Flex in your case, to build a simple map viewer. ... View more

Thank you for checking to confirm that the output connector you're using in your GeoEvent Service is not still configured to delete old features. I suspect that an old output connector, still configured and running, may be responsible for the periodic deletion of features. An Input does not need to be participating in a GeoEvent Service to receive event input. Likewise an Output does not necessarily need to be participating in a GeoEvent Service to have an effect on the system. If you want to export an XML of your GeoEvent Processor configuration I'll take a look and see if I can find anything to explain the behavior you're observing with features being deleted. - RJ ... View more

Client-side viewers must actively refresh their displays. In the Introduction to GeoEvent Processor tutorial's 'Making Features Come Alive' exercise, we use the Operations Dashboard because, as a web map viewer, it can be configured to refresh its display automatically every 1, 5, 10, ... seconds. It seems odd that your viewer is displaying features which are "updated" as new rows are added to the database table, but not displaying the features whose existing entries were updated. As for features getting deleted after a minute or so - have you configured the 'Update a Feature' output connector to delete old features? That is the only part of the GeoEvent Processor workflow you've described which would attempt to remove data from your output dataset. - RJ ... View more

Hello Jason - What output connector are you using?  There are connectors for writing GeoEvent data to a feature service as new/updated features. You'll want to look at 'Add a feature' and 'Update a Feature' and create an output connector for updating features, if you're target output is a feature service. - RJ ... View more

Hello Joe - As Jonathan mentions, using an ArcGIS for Server managed geodatabase to store your data would prevent the data from being copied to the Server and provide you a way to update the feature class supporting the service - perhaps using Python and the ArcPy Data Access module. That is probably your ideal solution. Alternatively you could update an off-line copy of the data and then develop a mechanism which would automatically republish the service (overwriting the existing service and continue copying the data up to the Server). To leverage data store approach, the database and the ArcGIS Server would need to be on the same network. A third alternative, relying on GeoEvent Processor, would be to use GEP's capability to watch a folder for files. This isn't ideal for your workflow however as the input connector out-of-the-box at 10.2.0 does not consider file size or last modified date; it only looks at the filename. This means that users who want to use CSV to send continuous updates into GEP need to have whatever mechanism they use to place the CSV files into the registered data folder uniquely name the files. This can be done by appending a date/time to the filename (e.g. FireRiskAssessment-09Sep13-102236.csv). /RJ ... View more

Chris, There is currently no documentation on the built-in store GEP uses to manage its users.  Similar to ArcGIS for Server, you can use the Manager to created users and assign them either 'User' 'Publisher' or 'Administrator' roles. Only 'Administrators' can log in to GEP Manager and administer the Inputs, Outputs, Services, and other configurable items. You must be a 'Publisher' or 'Administrator' to run the Service Designer web application. The GEP approach to its "User Roles" and "Identity Store" is changing with the 10.2.1 release due out Winter 2013. This next product release will better support server connections to ArcGIS Online and server connections to Portal for ArcGIS. We're also working on supporting the federated security model used by Portal and AGOL for enterprise authentication. /RJ ... View more

Have you tried registering any other system folder?  The Introduction to GeoEvent Processor tutorial chose to use C:\arcgisserver as the base folder only because that is the default server directory used by ArcGIS for Server, and we discovered that permissions for the OS-level user responsible for running the ArcGIS for Server and GeoEvent Processor services needed to be added to 'My Documents' folder when attempting to register folders such as C:\Users\<user>\Documents\ArcGIS. Try creating a folder C:\GeoEvent on the local HDD and registering that folder. The user you've logged-in as should be the owner of that folder. If the folder fails to register with GeoEvent Processor as a Data Store, try adding the OS-level user responsible for running the 'ArcGIS GeoEvent Processor for Server' service as a local user with 'Full Control' over the folder and any sub-folders. /RJ ... View more

Hey Adam - Thank you for the details and including the error from the GEP logs.  It may be that that your feature service output (at an instant in time) didn't have one or more required properties. I've seen this "validation failed" error message however when I know that the object in question is fully defined ... so I'm not going to focus too much on this particular error message. I'm more interested in your report that when you open the Data Stores page in Manager you see that the registered server connection displays as not valid. If you click the 'Validate All' button at this point, can the connection be validated? (If the GEP cannot access the registered data store to locate the service folder, I"?d expect that opening the configuration page for the output connector would display empty fields for the "?Service Name"?, "?Layer"? and (if updating features) the "?Unique Field Identifier"?.) To your comment that restarting appears to fix the issue - are you restarting the GEP Windows service?  I'm wondering if it is possible that an attempt by GEP to connect to the AGS site using the configured Server connection failed, but restarting GEP forced a second attempt which then succeeded... I think we may be dealing with a Server connection which is intermittently unavailable. Is there a way you can manually verify the connection from your GEP server to your AGS server when you are seeing this issue (outside of GEP Manager)? To your question of submitting incidents/tickets with Esri Technical Support - yes, if we have an issue that can be reproduced (since that is what Esri Support is supposed to do), then please open a new Support incident. Otherwise, posting to the forum as you are gets the issue in front of the development team and we can help diagnose it as quickly as we can make time for the investigation. Thanks for working with us ... /RJ ... View more

Hey Simon - What you are describing ought to work.  I conducted tests just the other day in which my GeoEvent Definition had fields 'CodedName' and 'CodedValue' and I sent multiple SMS messages:  Message to {$CodedName}:  ${CodedValue} We've never referred to these as "macros", but that's kind of like what they are. The ${FieldName} gets expanded in-line to the value contained in that field. The field names are case sensitive. What are you seeing in the SMS you receive?  Can you screenshot the entire sms-text-out connector configuration as well as your GeoEvent Definition?  Have you tried running the output to a TCP text output to confirm which GeoEvent Definition is being used to handle the event's attribute values? Do you, by chance, have more than one SMTP dependent output connector configured? The "?Send a text message"? and "?Send an email"? output connectors both rely on SMTP... /RJ ... View more

Hello Greg -- The error you posted looks like an issue with the installation of GeoEvent Processor. I might have recommended stopping the ArcGIS GeoEvent Processor service and then deleting the ...\data folder from the set of installation file folders beneath C:\Program Files\ArcGIS\Server\GeoEventProcessor and then restarting the service. But you indicated that you have already tried uninstalling the product, which is a more thorough way of accomplishing the same thing. You indicate that you deleted all of the services. Did you do this before you uninstalled, or after you re-installed? The best way of guaranteeing that you are starting fresh is to uninstall GeoEvent processor, then locate and delete the product's configuration files from the C:\ProgramData\Esri\GeoEventProcessor (WinServer 2008 / Win7) ... you might find these files beneath C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\ESRI\GeoEventProcessor on older versions of Windows. If you are still seeing the Unable to start blueprint container for bundle com.esri.ges.manager.internal-agsconnectionmanager org.osgi.service.blueprint.container.ComponentDefinitionException: Unable to intialize bean error message in the GEP logs after removing the product's configuration files and re-installing, please let us know. /RJ ... View more

Simon - We have had reports - from customers using other adapters - that the Field Mapper processor is not handling hierarchical data. They are also seeing what you describe; null values in their output when hierarchical data is mapped to a flattened schema. We are developing a hot-fix for this for the 10.2.0 release and refactoring how GeoEvent Processor components handle hierarchical fields and fields with cardinality greater-than one. The refactoring will be part of the 10.2.1 product release. For now, I do not have a workaround to suggest. What you are doing appears correct. /RJ ... View more

Adam - There is some internal disagreement on the extent to which deleting the user who created a GeoEvent Service, Input, and/or Output connector will have on a service's viability. One consideration is the type of input(s) and output(s) participating in the service and how exactly the service was designed. If you'd post a screenshot of your service with a description that would help as we work to collect empirical evidence to support/refute some assumptions. /RJ ... View more