Latest Contributions by Bud

A general question about managing data analysis projects. What questions do you ask the requester? Who is making this request (what level of management)? Who is the intended audience? Who will be on the project team? What do you want? Can you mock up a rough example in Excel or Illustrator, etc.? What filetype/platform? When do you need it by? Where is the data? Where will the final product live and for how long? Who needs access to the final product? Why are we doing this? Why now? What happens if you don’t get it in time? How are we going to do the work? What's the plan? Cleaning - How much data cleaning is required? How long will it take? Will we clean the source data or a copy of the data? How accurate do you need the analysis result/data to be? For example, if we were to guess that the data is 95% accurate, is that sufficient? Those questions are just a stab in the dark. What questions do you ask when taking on a data analysis project? I ask because I'm moving to a new team and am looking to develop some techniques for success to avoid the usual pitfalls of data analysis projects. ... View more

For read-only layers, table views, and joins that are slow due to complex querying: Right-click the Contents layer and choose a new Pause Re-query option. The data would be cached in RAM until manually refreshed. This would improve performance without the messiness of exporting to a FGDB. ... View more

ArcGIS Pro 3.5.0 I wonder if it would be useful to be able to use operations like OR and NOT in spatial definition clauses. Currently, only AND seems to be available. I haven't fully wrapped my head around possible use cases. Maybe someone else can say something smart here. ... View more

ArcGIS Pro 3.5.0 In the main Definition Query tab in the layer properties, the layer name used in the spatial definition clause is not displayed. See red circle. I'm wondering if the layer name could be included in the Geometry button in the spatial definition clause. There's not much space, so if the layer name gets truncated, then a tool tip should be available to display the full layer name. I think that would be better than forcing the user to open the Spatial Clause Geometry dialog to see what layer is being used. And for what it's worth, that dialog doesn't do a very good job of showing what layer is used either. Spatial Definition Query — Highlight chosen layer ... View more

Spatial Definition Queries: I’m wondering if it would be beneficial to select multiple layers of the same geometry type, such as multiple polygon layers, to be used for the spatial definition query intersect. For example, use CTRL+Click or checkboxes to select multiple intersect layers. Related:  Multiple spatial definition query clauses Union Feature Layer — Group layers with identical schemas into a single layer; apply properties to g... New Query Layer: Union   ... View more

ArcGIS Pro 3.5.0 Clipping Layers: When I click a layer in the Get shape from the outline of section, the layer's thumbnail is displayed, which is good. However, the layer name does not stay highlighted after clicking it. I think the layer name should stay highlighted after clicking it. Related idea: Spatial Definition Query — Highlight chosen layer ... View more

Edited. When creating a non-spatial definition query clause, it's easy to document the criteria by copying the SQL from clause mode. However, spatial definition query clauses don't seem to be based on SQL, the clause mode is blank, so we can't copy the SQL for documentation purposes. Alternatively, I'm wondering if a copy button could be added to the definition query window that would copy the spatial definition query parameter info as text to the clipboard. I'm aware that I can take a screenshot of the dialog. That works for some documentation purposes, but text is required for others. Do spatial definition queries use SQL or ArcObjects? ... View more

ArcGIS Pro 3.5.0 The "Add Spatial Clause" option is buried under the "Add Clause" button/picklist. I'm wondering if it would be more noticeable & intuitive to have a separate button for "Add Spatial Clause" right beside the "Add Clause" button. Or something better.   ... View more

ArcGIS Pro 3.5.0 Spatial definition query: When I click a layer in the Use the geometry of section, the layer's thumbnail is displayed, which is good. However, the layer name does not stay highlighted after clicking it. I think the layer name should stay highlighted after clicking it. Related idea: Display layer name in spatial definition clause ... View more