Latest Contributions by JimW1

@withershin - also wondering about it as this is the only way to do it legally. I think the service is quite expensive though. Getting someone to pay for it is always the hardest challenge. I fight to have a second monitor forget spend $$$ for data that will support business decisions. I remember trying to purchase digital globe imagery when I was in the mining sector and those guys had no interest in selling me 2 or 3 strips. I had a Canadian distributor essentially tell me that a delivery of the size of a city is about the smallest they'll do. Perhaps it is easier in the US. ... View more

I remembered this article: http://www.spatiallyadjusted.com/2011/05/13/latest-version-of-arc2earth-allows-google-earth-imagery-in-arcmap-legally/ I wonder if anyone has purchased their services. ... View more

Well, I have discovered that this is not the best approach.  The polygon buffers draw the gradients at a specified angle, rather than drawing the gradients in respect to the to and from's (duh).  There probably is no practical approach.  However, this will help highlight any areas that could be wrong, which helps a little bit.  Oh well. I was going to ask how you dealt with the angle issue for the gradients... Just brainstorming - I am a big fan of using colour to QA/QC data: If your 1_2 lines a digitized/stored directionly (to-from) then you could repurpose a script to divide the lines into equal sections You could then generate sections at say 1, 1.25, 1.5, 1.75, 2.0. You could then assign colour gradients to the sections 1_1 1.0 is Red 2_2 2.0 is Orange Then : 1_2 1.25 is Slightly less Red 1_2 1.5 is half way between red and orange 1_2 1.75 is almost orange 2_2 is Orange 2_1 1.75 is almost orange 2_1 1.5 is half way between red and orange 2_1 1.25 is Slightly less Red If I had some free time I'd do a mock-up but in my mind this could work. ... View more

Enabling TCPKEEPALIVE would probably address the firewall-terminated sessions, though it's probably worth the effort to address the brief connection firewall issue. - V Thanks Vince. This is great. Ultimately a SDE restart schedule will have to made. This issue only cropped up as our non-GIS DBA addressed our table lock issues through scripting (rather than a restart) and hopefully the TCKEEPALIVE will help the other issue. It's always a challenge when GIS is not under corporate IS/IT. ... View more

Is there any reason why this connection build up might be occurring?  Thanks in advance for any assistance. We just went through this learning exercise yesterday here. Apparently there is a bevy of reasons a instance will hang. For us, our corporate firewall closes the connection to SQL Server (ArcSDE) if the connection is inactive for more than 20 minutes. This will then hang the instance in SDE and report that a connection is still active. The only true solution/workaround has been to restart SDE. Crashes will also hang a connection. Hard reboots. Power Outages. Etc. This has been a known issue since 9.2 and is still happening in 10. Unfortunately it is our system security and there's not much we can do about it. I think bumping up the connections to whatever your system can handle would hopefully carry you over until the next time you restart SDE. That's what we are counting on here - we had 3 weeks of up time on SDE and only then did this problem surface. ... View more

My guess is that your raster is being rectified when it is being projected. I am assuming your WGS84 image was georeferenced but not georectified - this is typical for orthos from vendors. So when projecting to NAD83, Arc must georectify the image (Resampling Technique). The pixels are now all oriented north. If this is the case, I unfortunately do not have any good solutions for you. One not great idea would be to make the Output Cell Size to about half of what it is now and that would reduce the distortion but quadruple the storage space. In the past I have had to request NAD83 world files for an ortho delivery from the vendor to avoid this rectification issue (and to save HDD space). ... View more

I've done this with line buffering (sorry no examples on this computer) but basically you can buffer each type 1_1, 1_2, 2_2, etc. as single features and then buffer them. Then put a gradient fill on each polygon value as you've described. It isn't perfect. Actually re-reading your question I'd say the answer is yes it can be done (through buffers) but it is going to take a long time to make it look good. Good luck. Please post if you get it to work b/c it's a great visual idea. ... View more

I just tried the method using Feature Outline Masks (and also Intersecting Layers Masks) and this is a decent solution. I am impressed more by the Intersecting Layers Masks tool. I'm sure too with come creative buffering something could be made to do similar masking. Thanks Robert. Right-click the Data Frame name (e.g. Layers) in the TOC to find the 'Advanced Drawing Options' for those hunting for it. ... View more

Could you clarify this question a bit? The symbol's length would represent well depth or some other linear measurement? Or a parameter? So as you zoomed out the markers would stay different relative sizes to eachother? If so, I'm thinking a combination of Graduated Symbols and setting a Reference Scale should work. ... View more

I might be wrong but I do not think it is possible for ArcGIS to respect the colour codes when importing to pgdb - as far as my experience goes. Now if you export from pgdb to CAD and populate the CAD fields it will carry over to CAD. Long ago, I wrote some VBA script to read the colour codes and assigned the proper colours to the lines in ArcMap but unfortunately that code is long gone and was written back in 9.3 ... View more

...plus after hours of manual labeling there's always someone who comes up with "I don't like the font, can you make it bigger?" and you have to do it all over again. lol so true ... View more

I figured it was more complicated... This is crude: Function FindLabel ( [NAME] ) label_string = [NAME] Left_Dash = instr(label_string , "-") Right_Dash = instrRev(label_string , "-") leftside = left( label_string, Left_Dash) rightside = right(label_string, Right_Dash) FindLabel = leftside & vbnewline & rightside End Function For this very specific example it finds the hypen in the NAME string "Ottawa - Gatineau" and returns each side on a different line. See Attached. Depending on the complexity of your strings you'd likely have to throw a bunch of IF Statements to account for different combinations. It is doable but a bit tedius in VBScript. In a former role I labelled legal survey texts (1 attribute field) for parcels using a complex VBScript in the label parser engine and it was truly the last time I ever wanted to do this kind of work. Another method is to export the attributes to excel or access and make new individual attributes for each part. You can than join the resulting table back to the spatial data and label mutli-line based on the join. This would be my preferred method now as VBScript is too needy. ... View more

"& vbnewline &" still works in 10 ... View more

I would like to label contours in a way where the number of elevation will be on the line but without seeing the line behind the label.I mean I want line-number-continued of line.Do I have to do it by edditing the line,cutting at some points and placing the label there? I used halo but it makes sth like a buffer around the number so if the background for example is white (in general one colour) that is ok because it covers the line at that point and no prob but if the background is colorful then there is problem because you see also the buffer. I'm sensing you work with engineers... I've never found a satisfactory way to do this in ArcMap without a bunch of manual work. Some methods I've used: 1. Convert the contour labels to annontation feature classes and then use the XY of each annotation point to make a buffer and erase the underlying polyline 2. Make a polyline perpendicular to the general slope of the contours and then intersect the contours with the polyline. Then convert each vertex to a point label and erase using a buffer of the line (Engineer friendly) 3. Slowly die of tedium using representations to manually erase the line behind each annotation/label (see attached) 4. Convince your audience that labels above the contour line is the new fad in cartography and broken lines is so 1987 (Planner friendly) Representations are the best looking but are really for one or two small study areas and once seen usually spirals out of control where you spend hours upon hours making contours look pretty. For a non-ESRI solution the Surfer 10 makes contours with breaks for labels and they can be easily converted to shapefile or such but is not as robust as SA in ESRI. I'm hoping someone posts a better way to accomplish label breaks. ... View more