Latest Contributions by BrianOevermann

It appears that I, and my organization, may be an anomaly regarding this. Ever since I dipped my toe into the 3D/lidar processing waters I was able to convince IT to give me a higher spec machine. My relationship with IT has been great all along--my position started in IT, then re-org'd to Public Works, and is now full circle back to IT. The GIS power users have always had a slightly elevated configuration, much like the CAD users (someone else mentioned that angle) but with the onset of Pro the system requirements have increased. Our City has gone "laptops almost exclusively" and that helped during Covid lockdown--we simply took our machines home with us, followed by dragging home our monitors for the long haul. The reality is that Pro needs at least an Intel i7 CPU, at least 32Gb of RAM, and a discrete GPU. 64Gb of RAM is even better now. When you put those specs into context, that is a gaming laptop/PC. We have long been an "HP shop" but in the past few years the gaming/workstation spec'd machines from our vendor were astronomical in price. So we looked in a different direction. HP makes gaming laptops. You can get them from places such as NewEgg (ordered from there the first time around) but then we looked at Costco. Costco also sells HP gaming laptops. (It is a bonus that our city is the HQ for Costco, though we don't get any discounts for it!). We've been ordering gaming laptops from Costco now for a few years, for all of our GIS/CAD power users. We've upgraded RAM in them to get them to 32Gb or more if necessary. And are you aware of Costco's warranty? It's probably better than IT's vendor. The savings are huge compared to our regular vendor. But part of the question is how do you convince IT... You can't. You've tried and they don't want to budge. You are going to need to go above them--perhaps way above them. You can play the "staff time waiting costs more" card ("Mayor, how much idle time waiting for my machine is acceptable to you? I'm happy to drink coffee and surf the net while waiting.") but the analogy someone here used of equating your situation with a police car or fire truck works well, too. How much does a fully outfitted police car cost? Does it come from Ford/GM/Dodge equipped completely? Likely not. Our fleet adds all sorts of equipment after taking delivery. The delivered vehicle is basically IT's standard issue machine. But the minimum requirements of our software can't run effectively on that "base model". "Accessories" must be added to make it functional for the job. It is a cost of doing business in this modern world that we need higher end machines. Ask THEM to tell IT to give you the tools you need to do your job. Offer up the cost savings of sourcing machines from other vendors as a "we can get a suitable machine and save a bit of money, too" angle. Simple request: Don't buy all of the laptops Costco has! We need some inventory available for when we want to order. lol And just as a snapshot in time regarding cost/savings: I personally replaced my gaming laptop with a machine from Costco. Not HP--another brand that I like more. Intel Core i9 CPU, 32Gb RAM, Nvidia RTX 4070 discrete GPU. $1400 on sale ($1800 regular price). Even regular price is close to half of what our HP vendor was charging! [Note that I do understand IT's need to have reasonably similar machines for support reasons. But that is why we have only bought HP gaming laptops vs going with any brand available.] ... View more

@SpencerReichert, As @Allison_Hockey implies, the best methods for complex buildings requires "slicing and dicing" your building footprints for all of the various elevations of the building. There are two primary methods for doing this--one is to use the Modify Buildings task in the solution to split your footprint, but you will often need to query your point cloud for elevation values to update the various parts. The primary reason to use this method is that the process will automatically keep track of the IDs of the various parts of the building and ties them to a parent ID, which is used in the Fuse Buildings process. The easier way, in my opinion, is to pre-process your building footprints and split them out before extracting the buildings from lidar. This will process each of those individual parts against the lidar point cloud and more easily create the proper elevation and roof forms. To be fair, you will still need to tweak some of your roof forms, regardless, but I've found that the initial result is closer to 'correct' than not. The downside is that you will need to figure out what the 'parent ID' field is in the layer and manually select all of the parts of the building and assign them the same ID (just choose an ID of one of the parts to be the 'parent') before doing the Fuse Buildings process. I'm extracting trees at the moment on my lidar processing machine so I can't jump in and look to tell you what that field is. You might need to split a building with the Modify Buildings task to understand which IDs get changed to figure out the parent ID. I've attached a couple of screenshots of our hospital and a dairy plant that have a bit more complexity than 'normal' to illustrate how useful pre-processing the footprints can be. These were the results of the initial Create Buildings extraction from lidar with no further tweaks. Fair warning! This pre-processing can be a rabbit hole that can consume a lot of time. I wouldn't consider doing this for every building in your dataset. For the most part, I've decided that it isn't as important to get single family homes 'true to life', even in their roof forms. I've concentrated on the more complex buildings, our public facilities, and the 'icon' buildings that most people know so that when they eventually interact with the 3D scene (it's still a work in progress) they can immediately recognize them. Good luck and have fun! ... View more

@JenelleBlack, I'm not really surprised at all. The awesome flexibility of GIS means that there isn't ever a single method of doing things, making it difficult to please everyone. I think that is why many ArcGIS Ideas don't see any traction--the request is too niche even if it might help an entire particular segment of industry. I'm glad I don't make the decisions regarding the work plan. I've been in your position regarding other aspects of Pro (and Desktop before that). That said, Esri staff have finally joined this thread requesting feedback, namely @ChristopherAllen, so perhaps he will follow up with his own comments. He is on the charts team so your thoughts should make their way back to the rest of the team for discussion. When I approached staff with this issue at the 2022 UC, I pointed out that the best overall option would be to give us a setting in the options dialog to specify the number of decimals for display. But providing that ability will take more time to test for issues after building that functionality into Pro, making it harder to get on a work plan for implementation. And, as you point out, this thread has been all about more decimal places rather than fewer--mainly returning the display to the former 6 places. That is an easy 'fix' and requires almost no testing other than to make the change and verify it now displays that number of decimal places. In the overall view of things I would love the flexibility of the options dialog setting. But I'd rather have decimal places back in the short term and request the dialog option as an enhancement to be implemented in one of the upcoming development sprints. Perhaps submit your Statistics functionality desires in an Idea. If you share a link to it in this thread, I know that I will gladly upvote it and I am sure others will as well. ... View more

Here to post my 2nd Annual Update on this topic after attending the Esri UC. I saw my Esri staff friend, Alycia, again and got a bunch of my Pro questions answered (she really is an expert on Pro!). Then she walked me over to the island where the staff (who shall still remain nameless) from last year's interaction currently was. He, his Lead, and another staff whom was never introduced discussed the status of changing the number of decimals back to 6 places. I was assured that the decimal change will be in Pro 3.2 due sometime around October. I told them I would be posting an update to this thread and hoped they weren't going to make a liar out me! Crossing my fingers on that but it appears that the change is truly imminent. ... View more

@FaithSJohnson, see my reply to your other post above. Instead of selecting "Copy Table", first highlight the Sum row and then right-click and select "Copy Row" then paste that into a text document to see the full decimal places. FWIW, the text file can be a throwaway and doesn't need to be something you keep around. You just need to have somewhere to paste the copied info so you can see the full value(s). ... View more

@FaithSJohnson, I'm unsure if you can't get the table copy to work or the row copy (or something else). I am still using Pro 2.9.5 so if you are on 3.x your experience may now be different. See the attached graphic. I simply right-clicked within the statistics table and chose Copy Table, then pasted it into a text document. If you highlight a row and select Copy Row it will only give you that row information. My original post says "select toward the top" but you can right-click anywhere in the table. And, I realize I didn't explicitly say "right-click to copy" so I apologize if I confused anyone. ... View more

Marie, Hopefully @KoryKramer can confirm but I recall in this year's Esri UC Plenary session a slide that indicated this was either in Pro 3.0 or coming in 3.1. It was mentioned by whomever was speaking and got a decent bit of applause, which I think surprised the speaker a bit. Maybe I was too busy clapping to critically assess that! You might be able to view the plenary videos even if you didn't sign up for the virtual UC or attend in person. ... View more

And an update regarding the workaround of copy/pasting the value--you need to basically select the line and not the value itself to copy/paste. Somewhere along the way, just copying the value no longer holds the entire value and only has the single decimal place. The Esri staff were not aware of the copy/paste abilities but, really, how can you truly be aware of all of the intricacies of the software when they are making all of the seemingly minor tweaks on a regular basis. You can copy the entire table of statistical info if you select toward the top and copy. You might need to play around a bit to find the sweet spot. I don't happen to have Pro open at the moment to be more detailed. ... View more

So... while in-person at the Esri UC a few weeks ago I took the opportunity to "gripe" about this issue at the Pro product island. I had nothing but great interaction and engagement with Alycia regarding three topics we discussed, of which this was one. She briefly left and came back with another employee who could shed some insight on this particular issue. It turns out that this other employee (I won't name but he was great as well, seriously!) was the person that argued for changing it to one decimal place (who could have predicted that?). His reasons were sound, though shortsighted (my opinion). I requested a reversal to 6 decimal places (quick, easy, not much testing) or, better, an option for us to specify the number of decimals shown (obviously more development and testing). While he made no absolute promises, he sounded positive that they could just revert back to 6 decimals. I think they just didn't realize how people are using that information. It will be discussed by the Charts team. If it happens, we likely won't see it until Pro 3.1. I'm keeping my fingers crossed, but I'll believe it when I see it! ... View more

No disrespect, @Dominik but please note that others noted that this appeared to be fixed in a later version. However, at v2.8 the issue has returned and it is mentioned that it still persists at 2.8.3. While deleting the column with calculated geometry and recreating it might be a solution for a one-off calculation, it isn't a viable solution for workflows that include calculating geometry for new features added or existing features edited. Also, you use the term 'shapefile' a number of times in your proposed solution. I'm hoping you are using that term generically to mean the feature class because Thomas' issue (and mine plus others) is specifically regarding Enterprise geodatabase feature classes and not the shapefile format, which doesn't allow versioned editing. Esri simply needs to fix the issue! ... View more

I agree with the comments above. I have a ~12 sq. mile area city and my selected address point still gets lost. I can't imagine functioning with a state-wide dataset! I see a benefit for adding 2 (possibly 3) options to the selection pane in Options: Points, and lines/polygons (or split those out separately) - give option for a default scale or 'zoom to extent of selection' for each. 1/20th of the overall extent seems like lazy programming from someone who has never used the software (or done by direction of someone in the same situation). I can't think of any scenario in my daily work where that kind of zoom to selection is effective. ... View more

@KoryKramer  is there yet another update on this? Yet again, Esri is practically begging all of us to NOT move away from Desktop by ignoring basic viewing options regarding our data that have existed for years within Desktop and are widely used by all levels of users. All of us, whether daily or just occasionally, have a need to see when a layer was last modified. The information is present in the gdb. We simply have no option for checking a box to display that field in Pro like we do in ArcCatalog. It makes me wonder what focus group decided that functionality was unnecessary. Was there even a focus group convened for input? I now use Pro as my 'daily driver' and actually have come to prefer it over Desktop. But Esri time and time again has forced me back into Desktop for the most stupidly basic things. It's ridiculous. Sadly, at this rate I don't see myself uninstalling Desktop even after support is dropped. ... View more

I agree with @ChristopherBowering because I use that information for quick QC or a quick answer for someone ("Hey, can you tell me how many feet of pipe are along that stretch of street we were just discussing?"). Not a solution but a workaround: If you right-click the value and copy it you can then paste it into a text file, email, etc. and it retains all of the decimal places. So it is just a short-sighted decision during development regarding how many decimals to display with no way for us to modify it. I wish they would at least honor the unit format settings one can set in the Options for Pro. ... View more

Thank you @Anonymous User. That use case is centered primarily around the idea of best practice design to not have multiple fields for essentially the piece of information. The Notes field example is a classic case.  We often add a Notes or Comments field to feature classes or tables to capture the non-standard, free-form info needed to help explain a particular issue/situation ("Did not inspect. Angry hedgehog has a burrow adjacent to facility." *Not a real note!) Your Includes() function solution appeared to be a reasonable alternative, so I dove into the Smart Form to implement it. That is when I noticed that the Includes() function wasn't in the list in the Arcade Editor. Hmm. Diving into help there was a link to the version matrix, where I found that this function isn't available until the 10.9 release--and we are on Enterprise 10.8.1. Before posting my question I came across a post that used the IndexOf() function. It appears to do something similar so I looked further into it. In the end, I was able to make the IndexOf() function work for my purpose. For others' benefit, this is my syntax for the Notes field, which needs to appear for every activity in my domain list: IndexOf(['Register Replacement','Radio (MXU) Replacement','Meter Install','Meter Replacement','Meter Removal','Other'],DomainName($feature,"WorkType")) >= 0 Note: You use the domain's description and not the code for the list. My Smart Form is now working exactly how I need it to function! I believe the Includes() function would have worked well had I already been using 10.9. Now my only outstanding issue is that I get an "Unable to Submit, Unable to complete operation." error when I attempt to submit my form within Field Maps. Hopefully I can track down the cause of that soon. ... View more