Latest Contributions by AndrewQuee

Just adding some thoughts from a recent training session with more depth. Some of the ribbon designs choice are... seriously impractical.  Having half a dozen 'save' buttons littered throughout the ribbon which then block further edit or save operations is just silly.  I collected them all and put them on the quick access.  Whichever one isn't shaded out is the one that needs pressing, just save it and let me get on with my work, darn it!  A better design would be either to have one save button function that saves all changes, or when you leave a section that has unsaved changes to popup a "Do you want to save your changes?" dialog instead of letting users wander off and have to somehow find their way back to the section that needed saving.  Whichever one that was... Same for File - Print, oh no, I mean Share - Print.  I realise again that it's an intentional design, but changing a globally-understood workflow that has been in place for longer than the designers have (probably) been alive seems a bit short-sighted.  Much like Chromium removing backspace navigation because some inept users were wiping out their forms.  "If it ain't broke..."   To the quick access with you too, print button.  To rub salt into the wound, 'print' isn't even a searchable term in the command filter to even find the print button.  I know that the digital age has rendered etching images on flattened tree carcasses almost archaic, but it does needs to be done every now and again. The only risk here with adding more and more to the quick access is that I will eventually end up with every tool I use in the in the quick access bar, in which case I guess I could just turn off the ribbon altogether and have something that looks a bit like ArcMap, but more disorganised. ... View more

Thanks, very helpful.  Link is now dead, new one appears to be Imagery in Web applications: Should I use a cached map service or an image service?  ... View more

Just following up on this I still haven't found a method inside ArcGIS, although I did notice some relevant  other threads here. Looking at the documentation again, it does appear that you can build a review workflow in workflow manager and then automate it through the python workflow manager module.  Potentially this could be controlled via ModelBuilder and Workflow Manager Tools. Has anyone actually done this and to successfully automate automatic reports? ... View more

I like the scripting approaches shown here (nice work!) but I'm wondering if model builder might be a more efficient and easier process for Chuck to implement. We'd use Safe FME on this which would be fairly trivial, but I'm guessing Chuck doesn't have access to that. ... View more

100000000+ conversions! o_O  As I was reading this I was thinking "oh there's a few thousand or so rows."  Wow, no wonder Pro is freaking out on it.  Yep, best plan is to copy that data to a number field. ... View more

Just in support of your comment if you hadn't seen it already, further up the thread Thomas Colson reported seeing some pretty intensive network usage for simple operations. As Thomas just discussed general whinging "it doesn't work good" will be passed over by Esri.  What we need to do is show provable and replicatable examples of how it does not perform properly in specific cases, and how there is a demonstrable difference between Desktop and Pro in the same operation. I'm sure Esri is already doing/has done this, but once isolation tests are done, you can get down to specific cases and the parts of the application causing issues can be optimised or fixed.   Probably what is happening (or what we often see as GIS developers) is that one minor issue conflates with some other issues and maybe a bug, or sporadic problems with the OS/network/database to create a noticeable performance problem.   What the user sees is "doesn't work/grinds slowly" but actually solving that can be more complicated than just fixing one thing. ... View more

Thanks for that.  I thought those options would depend only on the GPU - I was running 40% load most of the time so I didn't try them.  I was consistently CPU bound, pegging it to 99%+ for the whole time. Worth a shot to test though.  If Pro is using the CPU to render graphics and ignoring your video card's capabilities, well that explains a lot, in particular why this thread exists. ... View more

I did the Esri course Migrating from ArcMap to ArcGIS Pro recently.  It was actually pretty good and took away a lot of the scare factor of change, while introducing all the shiny new widgets.  Although I still don't like all the design choices made (half the ribbon functionality could move to context menus rather than wasting time mousing back and forth), overall it does actually make sense grouping things together (much like Office does), and you can see how Esri is trying to guide you through certain workflows/procedures rather than the Desktop model of having toolbars littered everywhere. It's much like Windows 10 versus Windows 7: it does pretty much the same thing as the previous version but in its own way, which is annoying but more intuitive once you learn it. We still have no intention of moving from our highly-customised Desktop before 2025, but it does look like Pro is 'usable' (with decent hardware) and getting closer to being feature complete compared to Desktop.  It's quite usable for day-to-day GIS and simple digital map making; our cartographers are not convinced Pro is offset-print ready and Pro is also not usable with Adobe Illustrator. In some respects such as multiprocessing, new tools and especially management of AGOL, Portal and GIS Server, it's ahead of Desktop and does things Desktop can't do such as publishing and managing online resources directly. ... View more

Oh of course, it's cpu-bound, I could see that easily.  I was interested in how you found the technology compared to contemporary storage. We've had the same issues with cost.  Senior managers have difficulty understanding that a bog-standard micro desktop suitable for government form-fillers with some light Excel, Word and Outlook use is completely useless for GIS/geoprocessing.  We've actually had replacement requests knocked back because we "don't need a gaming/multimedia laptop"  or even "you don't need a laptop, you can use a desktop" (for field work?) and had to escalate back up the chain to get the hardware needed for the job. Even ICT doesn't get GIS and big data/processing requirements.  In the last PC roll out they dodged the question of backups and when I complained (while they were decommissioning machines)  we had sixty 1TB drives to copy they said "there isn't enough network capacity for that, just back up your data to usb thumb drives"   *snort*  Sure.... ... View more

I'll just add that both computers used above are standard (not premium) SATA SSDs and all the data, OS and temp data was on them, not a spinning platter. We're looking to go to M.2 NVMe for our next hardware upgrade, based on where high-end gaming is going.  How do you find this works in a GIS environment? ... View more

I just did a Pro training course.  For simplicity, I took our (admittedly elderly) dual 2.2GHz, 4Gb Windows 10 laptop.  This has run Desktop (many versions) perfectly fine for years along with a suite of other GIS/DB tools, and seemed to work okay with some basic testing of Pro after installation. Once I loaded up some tutorial data for exercises, it was agonising.  99+% CPU usage, most of the GPU and perilously close to thrashing page file (I shut down everything possible to shut down in Windows) running consistent 1.5-2GB RAM usage.  It was basically unusable, 1-2 minute waits to do anything in Windows, and I could see Pro literally rendering every object second by second.  Sometimes it just gave up and said "meh, close enough for government work" This was with a few tiny tutorial datasets and the web basemap/hillshade. I didn't even dare trying 3D seeing as Pro was unable to even handle a file explorer dialog.  After falling further and further behind the class simply because Pro does not run on a Desktop-capable computer, I gave up and ditched it for my workstation (2014 quad 3.4GHz, 16GB) for which is was fine, although the NVidia Quadro struggled a bit with frame rates in dynamic 3D. Looking at what it was doing, I think Pro is spinning up a large number of background processes/services which eat up resources (geoprocessing handler, job handler, etc.)  I could also see it dynamically building displays, panes and elements, sometimes rejigging them in real time as things opened and changed to get the desired layout, so there is a lot of work going on under the hood which is much more demanding and sophisticated than Desktop.  Every time you click on something it is running through a whole set of rendering/workflow/data management dependencies. For example even something simple like opening an attribute table.  In Desktop, bang, open pane with first X lines, done.  In Pro it was doing some kind of indexing, analysis, calculating different font sizes, column width etc to make it all 'look nice' before opening the table, and then of course depending on docking it had to resize multiple other objects and re-render them as well. Short story: Unless you have a fairly new computer, expect that you will have to upgrade it to run Pro. ... View more

We find the vertex key indispensable in our workflows, generally split into two cases: 1. 'Eyeballing' the stroking of a contour/hydrographic line: To the experienced editor they can see for what scale vertices need to be added or removed, it's also important in stereographic capture.  Seeing all vertices on a feature in a view extent (and comparing to similar nearby features) is important to judge whether the vertex interval should be increased or decreased a for given purpose. 2. When dealing with exact cadastral features, this alerts users that a surveyed point is either missing or need to be put in.  Also where a node has been inserted that should not be there, i.e. two COGO lines with same bearing which would appear to be one straight line otherwise. With experience a glance of the vertices compared to the survey plan can show compliance to a fairly high confidence level.  Extra vertices stand out like the proverbial. In both these cases snap-level vertex display is not much use, as we look at all the vertices on the feature, and it is the overall context between them and the extent that is important.  Snapping-level display is akin to exploring a cave using a lighter to see - you can only see one tiny part of it at a time, and can't compare one section to another. Also in these cases, ornamenting the vertices or endpoints is impractical.  For cadastre, it's not that bad but ugly especially once you start layering topological themes, but when it comes to contours you're talking millions and millions of points.  Eeech. ... View more

That would be lovely, thanks.  Back in the day (9? 10?) there was a single page summary and a cute brochure that was packaged with the install DVDs.  This one, I think. I kind of prefer it all in one place, but there's so many shortcuts now (as you've shown) that perhaps it's better if they are sectioned into parts for digestibility.  The online help works okay to discover them, all being indexed from your first link "Use ArcGIS Pro with a keyboard". The only thing I would add to that is have a 'related topics' section or keyword tagging at the bottom of the page so you can flow from topic to the other. ... View more

There sure are, they work almost exactly like Desktop (some extras for 3D mode).  One new one for Pro I only learned today is Hold C-CTRL and left click to immediately centre the map pane on that point.  A little awkward but also slightly more positive in the heat of the moment than middle-click-dragging contents more or less to where you wanted them, accidentally roll the wheel, revert to set scale/undo navigation, drag again... etc. A good option if you are working on layout at an exact scale and trying to get best fit on the page. ... View more