Latest Contributions by BrianOevermann

Claire, As PNW snowstorms go, it was fairly straightforward. Our Public Works Operations crew did an amazing job (as always) keeping up. And, selfishly, I love that the snowplowing status viewer becomes one of the highest trafficked items on our website during these storm events! Thank you for the link. I had come across that before posting and gave the second method a quick try. The first method--bookmarks--isn't feasible because it is noted that the bookmarks aren't persistent even though you save the dashboard. That's unfortunate and seems like a huge design flaw within Ops Dashboard. I tried the second method again before replying. My original extent extends well outside of our city limits but I increased it even more, figuring that I could refine it if the result was trending in a positive direction. I removed and replaced the web map in my dashboard and the extent was still the same as before. I think the second method might work well for extents smaller than the full extent though. I'd really like to understand the Ops Dashboard Team's thought process when designing the map window's functionality. My expectation is that if I create a map window on my dashboard--of any size--that the map will interact within the boundary of that window. So, if I draw a postage stamp-sized map window, my map's full extent will be displayed within that "postage stamp". Not very useful in practice but that would be a failure regarding my dashboard design decisions and not a technical issue with the map window. Unfortunately, this shortcoming is yet another within Ops Dashboard that is causing me to abandon its use (again) for what would otherwise be a perfect medium for presenting data to a less technical audience. If anyone has other ideas regarding a solution I am open to hearing and trying them! ... View more

Jonathan Quinn‌, it is honestly water under the bridge for me now. This was my first upgrade with Portal involved so I anticipated only about a 3-4 hour Enterprise upgrade. How wrong I was! It was about 4 hours just for the Portal upgrade alone. With that short anticipated time window I chose to take Enterprise offline during the day in order to have my IT colleagues close at hand should something go awry. I was happy to find the solution on my own since I was facing the decision point of either inconveniencing my users for another whole day or rolling our VM back to pre-upgrade and re-scheduling the upgrade to another day/time. It ended up being a 15 hour day for me, though that included work hours that were before the start of the upgrade process. I've pretty much given the support analyst the scenario and steps taken so they should be able to set up their own test environment and do whatever testing they deem necessary. At the very least I am hoping that he documented my solution in the database so that it gives staff another possible thing to try if others have the same issue. The upgrade document for Server has you clearing your browser cache before you even start the upgrade. I don't know if that is viable with the Portal upgrade. Logic tells me that step was placed where it is for specific reasons. ... View more

As I mentioned in my original post, I followed up with my Tech Support rep and provided my solution to my issue. After thanking me for my detailed email, my troubleshooting, and mentioning that he was making a note of this solution he responded with: "I would like to mention that we do not recommend to re-load the page or clear the browser cache while upgrading ArcGIS Enterprise. Otherwise this can be a workaround as a part of troubleshooting." Huh... and to be honest, arghhh! If that is the recommendation, then why is it STEP 8 in your upgrade document? I mean, the instruction to clear the browser cache (including cookies) isn't buried in another step. Esri explicitly made that task its own step in the process. So, I guess you need to decide on your own if you perform step 8 or not as Esri seems conflicted in what we should do. ... View more

I agree, Ryan. The takeaway here in my mind is that Step 8 seems to clear out whatever is loaded in step 7 and it takes a reload of the page to 'fix' it. It's interesting that the Server upgrade document says to clear your browser cache before you even start the upgrade. I'm unsure if the Portal upgrade document simply needs to have the cache clearing step listed earlier or if this only happens to certain people. ... View more

I don't want to sound negative, but I've noticed over the years that if someone in the community creates some functionality then Esri will explicitly avoid creating the same or similar functions in the base software. I think it's a legal covering of butts so that there are no possibilities of lawsuits requesting royalties for ideas/code/whatever. I, for one, will avoid the GitHub project and hope that an Esri-created solution is added to the base software. It's our only hope of having something that just works between version upgrades. And honestly I just want something embedded in the software that doesn't require a separate configuration. We should just be able to right-click on the database connection and have a "Show state tree" item to select. It occurred to me (too late for this year) that we maybe should create a coordinated effort for anyone going to the User Conference to stop by the ArcGIS Enterprise island (and ArcGIS Pro island for good measure), ask about the state tree diagram functionality, and explicitly request it be added. The employees take notes and if there is this recurring theme of "I want a state tree diagram" then maybe our desire will get elevated/considered. Beats waiting six years for nothing! We might also consider bringing it up in the Pre-Conference Q&A survey comments. ... View more

I agree with Ray's comments and add that "a picture is worth a thousand words". I don't have the ability to look at the state table and visualize this diagram. I'm not Neo in the Matrix! (bonus points for you if you get the reference) I'm beginning to wonder if this is a case where the "guy" who originally wrote the code left and now the rest of the team is not knowledgeable enough to understand how to maintain/port it. Esri developers are way more talented for that scenario to be true, so prove me wrong and add it! ... View more

Even though this is now a documented bug I thought I would add our experience. Yesterday I whipped together a dashboard that uses the Details widget. My data has attachments. I showed the dashboard to a co-worker, whom loaded the dashboard into IE. Image attachments overlapped the last few attribute fields. This does not happen in Firefox nor Chrome. ArcGIS Enterprise 10.6.1 for those keeping track of affected versions. ... View more

Joshua makes some great points regarding why the address points are at the ends of driveways but there are ways you can mitigate some of the concerns he brings up. My former job was with a rural county in Montana with some large lots, long driveways, and structures not even visible from the road. My current job is with a city in Washington State with lots of trees where some homes even on smaller lots are not visible from the street. Different environments but similar issues. In both of these organizations we created driveway segments for structures where access from the road was not very obvious or simply confusing. And at least in my current job, I created a "Street class" field to classify the streets for better/easier symbology, including completely filtering out certain types of streets. This makes it easy to completely drop the driveways on maps where their inclusion is unnecessary and simply clutters up things. These driveway segments have zero address ranges and a discrete intersection node is NOT created where it connects to the street (no slicing and dicing of the street segments just to accommodate driveways). Another possible method is for you to create your "analysis-capable" address points as discussed in earlier messages (purely as a means to do what follows), create X,Y fields in the data and calculate the values of the point into those fields. Then add equivalent X,Y fields to the existing 911 address point layer and cross those "analysis X,Y" fields over. Now whenever you need to perform analysis you would create an event layer using the analysis coordinates and then perform your analysis. This would eliminate you needing to maintain two address point layers that must be kept in sync but realistically adds some process overhead, particularly if you plan to do much analysis. I admittedly would not choose this method if at all possible but I understand that some organizations might have some constraints for which this might be the only way to accommodate needs. You definitely want to gather all of your stakeholders and have a discussion of the pros and cons of various methodologies if your aim is to maintain a single address point layer that will meet everyone's needs. ... View more

Create your parcel centroids. If the process doesn't populate a field containing the PIN from your parcel layer, intersect your centroids with the parcel polys to get the PIN into your centroid layer. Add all of the relevant fields from your address layer to the centroid layer. Now, do a join from the address layer to the centroid layer using the PIN as the key. Then use the Field Calculator to calculate the values of the fields in the address layer to the centroid layer fields. The centroid may not be over the actual structure but it will at least be within the parcel. You can optionally move the centroid over the structure based upon imagery if that is a goal. Edit [to add missing info]: Once you've calculated the values into the centroid layer fields you can remove the join. Doing a spatial join to get the relevant data across would also be a valid--more than one way to get from point A to point B! ... View more

I'll ask another question: What other attributes are stored in the address point data? You somewhat imply that the 911 address data is used by the Assessor (or maybe I should read that as "the Assessor has the same problem as I do"?). Perhaps a parcel ID has been added to the 911 data for Assessor use? This is likely wishful thinking but if a parcel ID is in the address data then your process just got 1000% easier. ... View more

For polygon centroids check out ET GeoWizards. There is a point to polygon tool and can even force it to create the centroid within the polygon (for those oddly shaped polys for which the centroid would fall outside). No Advanced license needed. ... View more

Michael, Just a guess since I haven't used this tool... I think if you build your own grid using the schema Bucky pasted in above, you would need to manually populate all of the neighboring page number fields. If one used that Create Grid Index tools (or whatever it's called) I would expect that the tool would auto-populate those fields. However, with the tool you likely don't have as much control over the resulting grid. That may or may not be an issue. Perhaps you've heard the old saying that every project falls on the boundary of four [USGS] quads. That saying is from the days where system resources and storage were such that you couldn't store a reasonably-sized area in one layer but had to tile it--usually aligning it to the USGS 24K scale quads. Without fail, when I've tried the 'create grid' tools (not the current one but ones now years back) the result puts a set of tile boundaries right on or very near the most important street intersection or feature for that map book! So I've usually resorted to building out my own index grids. The one I used above happened to already have been created and used in CAD by our utility data gurus, so I co-opted it and converted it to a GIS feature class. Edited for grammar. ... View more

Bucky, Think of the FireMapIndex layer as the source for each page of your fire map book. The polygon layer you create (because from all of your discussion it appears that such a layer does not already exist) will be a set of polygons that cover your entire district (or the portion(s) that you want in the map book). See the attached graphic for an example of ours. Our grid has tiles and quarter tiles but yours doesn't need to be that complicated. Ideally choose a scale (zoom level of detail) that you want each page to show and draw your polygons based upon that. You would then need to populate each of those fields that you listed in your message above to enable the OOTB tool to do its magic. There is likely already a data schema for the index layer that you can use to draw your polygons into. One thing I've noticed, after reading this entire thread, is that you may be having a hard time visualizing what each of these layers should generally look like and what the overall tool ultimately does. While I haven't used this particular tool, and our grid index isn't set up with the required attributes, I would be happy to package up our relevant data and send you--offline--a link to download it from our OneDrive site for you to look at and/or load into the tool to understand the bigger picture. Offline:  briano at issaquahwa dot gov I won't get into my opinion of public agencies charging other public agencies for data... Does the County have an e911 entity? Perhaps you can get the data through them. They would likely have site addresses, streets, and a fire district (response entity) layer from which you can extract your particular area. ... View more