Latest Contributions by DanaNolan

Completely agree. I get rollback/commit, I thought you were asking to somehow get your unsaved transactions back. I would love a message about what happened, again, assuming I can trust that it is 100 percent correct.  Also, I suspect that many GIS users have imperfect, not "reliable" networks. I work for a huge site out in the middle of the desert, which despite all sorts of network and power management smarts, loses power or browns out occasionally. Plus those smart managers cause problems testing and installing fixes that they are required to push. There are probably  lots of single-GIS analyst, small agency shops that are stuck with ancient computers and protocols and idiots for network managers. ... View more

Here is my much less technical take on this. Databases can become corrupt; the different files that make them up can get out of synch, or a record can be incompletely saved or saved on a disk sector with problems. I have had this happen many years ago on a small PC network, and the database continued to work until the bad data area was accessed. Then we had to reenter everything entered since the failure after restoring to an earlier, safer date (a date that was not easy to figure out) because a good chunk of the data could not be viewed or printed. I would prefer database software drop everything in process when there is a lost connection and avoid even the slightest chance of corruption, especially if it does not quickly provide reliable information about the integrity of the database after reconnection. I assume it lost my edits but that I can renter them. This has always happened with SDE, and I have more confidence in it than my file-based databases such as FGDBs. ... View more

Once you set up a style, you probably will want to use Style Manager in ArcMap to clean it up periodically. You can also copy and paste between styles. So that is where you fix names, add tags, remove duplicates, etc. BTW, everyone has a style somewhere deep in the C drive, and that is where your style stuff is saved by default. The location varies by version, and you need to copy styles sometimes after an upgrade. So you can either periodically copy stuff out to a shared style, or just try to remember every time to save new style elements to the shared style. ... View more

Yes, that is HTML text flowing. Not the easiest concept to grasp, so maybe HTML 102. I did a full certificate in Web stuff in the mid-oughties, but many Web people still don't get the power of flexible layout, since they learned tables in the nineties and early oughties. ... View more

The HTML Popup tool is the Identify tool in customizable form. I did many customizations at a past job that no longer work due to some syntax changes in XSL, I think. Also, I don't use the same data. But if you use the ESRI examples as a starting point you might get something to work. They use tables and other old-school coding that is harder to work with. The example I used had the option of ignoring fields, which is useful. If you use divisions <div> to control layout of text, it can easily flow to fit its containers, that is, act like columns. Say 2 25-character divisions within a 60-char division might look like columns. There are probably lots of ways to get columns in HTML/CSS, I just no longer use it much. ... View more

X-ray for Geodatabases/ArcCatalog, perhaps? I can't get it to run on my security-limited system, but it has fans. ... View more

We always save as Reduced PDF. We were never able to e-mail large scale maps before this option, as we are limited to about 10MB on attachments. Additionally, when we were locked out of our share drive data due to some idiot, we could pull some maps out of Outlook. It is also much easier to open a smaller file, while giant PDFs will only open on one or two machines (not the GIS machines of course). The option seems to re-expand when viewed or printed, i.e., there is no noticeable loss in quality, and to start printing on our plotters faster. This is based on 3 years' using this option. We usually do not include layers or geo info in map pdfs and export at about 220-250dpi using RGB. I do not reduce for sending to our print shops; they get much higher DPI CMYK exports, which have to be FTPed. I have never seen any reason to run it twice on the same file, unless it was a mapbook with some page changes. . ... View more

You can do that in Maplex with 1 or 2 label classes, 1 for a polygon. You can choose the 'can place label outside' option with place inside the polygon as the primary choice, and limit or prevent label overrun. The leader lines won't show on the inside placement, and the bigger polygons or polygons in less crowded areas will be labeled inside, the smaller, with leader line, outside placement. ... View more

My observation is that Never Remove causes all the other rules to not work well. They seem to be ignored in ArcMap (don't have Pro yet). I never use it because I don't have confidence that I can tell what's going on, even though I am hugely experienced with Maplex. If you're overriding rules, you don't learn the rules well, right? You could try the simple callout style background text with just leader lines, or as you did, just halos/masks. It looks in the early example that Maplex is trying to not cross those big talk-bubble leaders. It also looks like your not letting the fonts scale smaller. Rather than converting everything to annotation, I get labels to fit sometimes by selecting out the nonplacers into a different labeling class with perhaps smaller fonts or other options that help labels fit. The final label rendered by the second could have been drawn by one class (it is not smaller than my minimum scale), but it won't.  I have an untested theory that having two classes keeps the placement battle shorter or simpler, so the label engine does not give up on any labels. I have 2 it particularly dislikes, so I do sometimes put these in a map annotation class called Unplaced. ... View more

You can try using the Description on the Symbology tab. This allows an extra entry in the legend, but there is not much layout flexibility. Agreed, I think I voted for this idea at least a year ago and it is popular ... View more

I am using the only connection that lets me do schema changes. So it is MY highest level of access. The point of the question was that I can remove any other field I want to except this field. According to ArcCatalog, SDE is the owner of the table (it was set up that way years ago, so I can't explain why, except that it is behind an extreme level of firewall protection.) As far as not using SDE user, we were forced  suddenly into Operating System Authentication, but it did not work correctly for schema changes and perhaps has other issues, otherwise, I would have been able to stop using database authentication. I am the DBA for GIS, but not the SQL Server admin.   ... View more

Agreed; I have a file gdb called something like domainHelp, but I add/update some domains to this with Domain to table tool, and never use my Excel tables after bringing in domains. Although, occasionally we export domains to Excel tables so users can fill in attribute data with the domain as an Excel dropdown/validation list. Having domains in a database makes it easier to view, report, compare, and join to domains. ... View more