Latest Contributions by curtvprice

I have script that does everything I want, except that I create two pivot tables...  I want these two dbf tables to automatically be added to ArcMap after the script runs.  Is it arcpy.MakeTableView_management?  For feature classes I used MakeFeatureLayer and the ApplySymbology... but can't seem to find anything for DBF tables If you set up the output table names as parameters of type Output, they will appear in the ArcMap TOC when the tool completes. If you want full control over the names and locations of these tables, you can set the parameter type to Derived, which means they don't appear in the tool dialog -- but you have to set the paths into the parameters with SetParameterAsText(). Here's the relevant help article: Setting script tool parameters ... View more

Is it possible to extract by mask or clip a .lyr file without the original raster file. No. Layer files simply point to a dataset in their source property. A layer file without a link to a dataset will not display, much less provide the data to a tool. ... View more

As far as I can see, no special characters, no numbers first, no spaces etc. One more potential problem that I should add to the list are any SQL keywords for field names: "IN","OVER","COUNT" etc. ... View more

I am trying to use Raster Calculator Map Algebra to convert the values of 0 from blue area to NoData in the overlapping area behind there... This expression below converts those pixels to 0.. Con("polrecl", 0, "maskdpoly") I think what you're missing are the IsNull and SetNull tools, which are very useful for this kind of thing. These two (equivalent) Raster Calculator expressions should do what you want, if I'm understanding you correctly: SetNull(not IsNull("polrecl"),"maskdpoly") Con(IsNull("polrecl"),"maskdpoly") The Extract By Mask tool may do what you want without any map algebra, or you could even just set the geoprocessing environment mask to control which cells are used by the Zonal Statistics As Table tool. There are a zillion ways to do things in Spatial Analyst, as you can see! ... View more

You're dealing with two datum differences - horizontal datum and vertical. Make sure you use the appropriate transformation of your test points to project your horizontal locations properly to the WGS84 datum. You didn't say what your horizontal datum was on your maps; NAD27 is based on Clarke_1866 spheroid so maybe that will do. If so, I believe the appropriate transformation would be "NAD_1927_To_WGS_1984_2" (ArcGIS install folder/Desktop10.0/Documentation/geographic_tranformations.pdf, p. 22). Vertical transformations are another deal - you'll need to find out what local sea level is in EGM96 and offset your sea-level datum Z values accordingly. ... View more

Although there are tools for Warp and Rotate for raster data, these (for some reason) were left out of the Editing toolbox. We need Rotate Features and Warp Features tools! ArcInfo Workstation tools can do this - but there are no tools to do so in ArcGIS Desktop. ... View more

This wasn't a question necessarily for end users, but more for the creators of the [10.1] samples in the help perhaps it can be taken offline or a followup at the UC. Thanks for the clarification, Ted. I think it's annoying that we have yet another path in the ArcGIS environment to consider (I could about six right now.) If any of the sample authors can chime in, this would be good to see here. Some of us can't make it to San Diego, unfortunately, and this is a good venue to discuss it I think. [If we] give the power users on here the power to give points to themselves when it would be their opinion especially if its from their answers. I'm innocent, Ted! I did not check my own answer, and if I had the power would not do it that lightly. (Note, I don't even see the check icon on my screen, either.) I agree if this power is given to MVPs we should get some guidance. One would be not to check your own answer unless the user has responded that it solved their problem. ... View more

So, I am being seeing more and more of the samples using os.getcwd(), is this a better approach than setting a wrksp variable with env.workspace? Ted, I wouldn't recommend this -- in the context of ArcGIS script tools, the workspace is used in tool parameter validation (to generate default output workspace paths in output parameters) and by the geoprocessor methods, and the scratchWorkspace allows user, model, and script control of where scratch files are written.  I think that by far it is best practice to use these arcpy environments and keep consistent with what ArcGIS standard tools do. I mean the code looks pretty smooth, then throw on os.path.join to combine your gdb paths with your fd/fc, does look cleaner, rather than having a lot of wrksp and swrksp 1,2,3,4 and so forth. Functions like arcpy.ListFeatureClasses() use the current workspace, and tools write to the current workspace without you having to specify paths. You still can use os.path.join(), os.path.dirname(), os.path.normpath() etc. as you need to. I afraid I don't know what you mean by "a lot of wrksp and swrksp 1,2,3,4 and so forth." ... View more

I assume you've checked for leading or trailing spaces in the field names?  Is the data available to share? I'm with the perceptive Mr. Quinn. You need to be very careful with .xls and .txt tables that they follows Microsoft Jet/.shp/.dbf file naming limitations: No tables or field names starting with a number, no spaces, no special characters (except "_"), short (10-chars). To avoid trouble, I try to follow these rules with all datasets. You can always be more creative with field aliases and layer names, but the datasets themselves should use "safe" names. If you do that, field names are also less likely to be garbled if the geoprocessing workflow goes through  .shp or .dbf formats. If you violate these rules, the tabular data may be read okay, but joins are not likely to work. As for the Copy Features tool, I believe it's a it's a much more useful method than data/export, since when you want to do it again (say after you change the underlying data), you don't need to go wandering through the interface, you can instead pull the Copy Features out of Geoprocessing results and re-run it. The Copy Features tool also is guaranteed to honor the specified environment settings for Current Workspace and Qualified Field Names. ... View more

I am trying to make a script a bit more friendly by removing the need for a user to manually alter the directory location of a workspace. Here's a shortcut to Jim's approach: if you provide layers from the mxd as arguments to your tool instead of dataset paths, and set up the mxd to use relative paths, you don't have to worry about paths at all. Once you have the layer inside the script, you can use arcpy.Describe(lyr).catalogPath to get its full path if you need to locate the workspace. If you would rather use full dataset paths instead of layers as script parameters, here's the rest of Mathew's method to the next step of finding the folder where the current map document lives: import os mxd = arcpy.mapping.MapDocument("current") mxd_path = mxd.filePath mxd_dir = os.path.dirname(mxd_path) It may be easier to help you if you provided some information about what the script does, for example, what you are doing with the workspace path once you get it. ... View more

Did you do the vector to raster conversion from multiple feature classes? Are the gaps at where those input datasets meet? If so, it is possible introduce gaps in the rasterization process due to resampling -- especially if you didn't specify a snap raster. ... View more

I have come to a bump in my model. I would like to be able to trim a polyline to a specific length (metres), which is possible manually using the Trim to Length function available from the Editor toolbar. I can not however get this included into my model, so that it can be automated. I am aware that Modelbuilder is for geoprocessing tools, but is there some way I can add this function into my model, possibly as a script. Any help is greatly appreciated! Have you tried Trim Line tool from the editing toolbox? (This a new toolbox at 10.0.) ... View more

Do you know of any other way to take all the rows in the attribute table and merge them into one row.  I think I can do this in plsql but i would like to keep this all in python. Try the Dissolve tool. This will create a new feature class from just the selected features, but then you could immediately use SelectLayerByAttribute with SWITCH_SELECTION and CopyFeatures to a new feature class, and then append your Dissolve output to that new feature class. ... View more

  If a tool is used manually from ArcToolbox it only processes selected records. I had expected the same to happen using Python but it didn't. This is because you chose a layer (not a dataset) off the pick list, to pass to your tool when you used it "manually". Datasets don't have "selected sets", only layers do. ... View more