Latest Contributions by RobertBorchert

It is an unfortunate truth that ESRI street data is lacking in completeness and accuracy. The same will hold true for any street coverage you may acquire from most agencies. The issue is not limited to ESRI. For my clients is has been a long process over years.  IF you can get them to give it to you ESRI does not generate centerline data they rely on other sources to provide it.  For each of my clients areas I have spent years drawing in roads based on air photos and from road construction maps. Generally my favorite source for good center line data is from a county's E911 system.  Oftentimes ESRI's data is not great because some agencies that actually generate new and accurate data are not willing to share it. ESRI center line data happens to match the center line data from my state DOT.  and that only gets updated every few years. So i downloaded the ESRI NA all roads data and have selected and am working with only a few counties in my area which I wanted to create a network dataset on. The attributes it contains are great and will be perfect for my usage, but at first glance and investigation I can see some streets (in-particular main highways and interstates) that have sections missing. Some areas where it is just multiple links and the road picks up again. I have my county data with all streets that seems to have it right, but the ESRI data within is much much better. This is going to be saved onto a university database for class purposes, so I would like to make sure the connections are made. What would work best to keep the ESRI data but have the connections made: simple spatial join? Append? ... View more

When you label the polygon in Maplex you choose regular placement.  There is a box to check IF it is ok to place it outside of the polygon. If you then click on properties and fitting strategy there is an Overrun Feature Check box.  that should be unchecked. If you click on Label Position tab (in properties) If you select Anchor Points you can choose eroded center (always in Polygon) as well Hello all, I'm using ArcEditor 10.1. I hope this is easy and I just haven't figured it out. I can't get maplex to only label inside the polygon. Before maplex, there was a nice check box that said "only label inside polygon" but I can't get maplex to do it. Has anyone figured this out? Thank you, ... View more

When you exported the shape file did it add it back to your session. Try adding the fields in ArcCatalog Alas, I spoke too soon. When I converted to a shapefile, the properties no longer allow me to add fields (as I would do with any other shapefile). Is it now possible to transfer data between shapefiles? ... View more

Sadly your best bet may be to dissolve all the polygons based on plat name and block (in a copy of course) then create annotation based on new polygons.  then you can get rid of the dissolved polys and keep the annotation. What I did was create a new point feature I simply call Lot label and use it to create labels for blocks and plat names.  You can set it to remove duplicates but it would cause to many errors in that the plat next to it might have the same Block number  and it would only show one of the two. I would be willing to bet there is a script that can be built as an expression for the label field to match up plat name and block number and only show the block one time.  However it is still going to associate it with one polygon. Hence you may be best off going through the trouble of making annotation.  At least with the anno the text was not move around. I am working with some cadastral data and within city and towns there are the familiar lot, block, plans. Where there is a "block", I can label the lots, parcel number and so forth for each individual polygon, but what I am having trouble with is label the block number for the lots that belong to the Block.  I can actually label the block using maplex and set limits and placement properties for the most part, but what I am not seeing or able to do "visually appealing" is to have the block number placed in the middle of the lots. I dont have any special extension that city planners would use and I really dont want to dissolve the polys for each and every block as I have a very large number of urban areas to work with. Any thoughts? ... View more

If your topology is clean on the parent it should (knock on wood) be clean when you replicate it. You still need to run validation on the new topology. http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.1/index.html#//006200000006000000 Robert, I'm unsure what you mean by clean up.  Do you mean address all of the topology errors that may exist in the topology?  If I do this before I make any replicas, will this solve the problem? Thanks, Scott ... View more

A layer file really isn't a feature class. It is a pointer to the feature class and the desired symbology for that feature. So when you open that layer file it will point to the original feature the layer file represents. Open the layer file and export it as a shape file or to a database if you are uncertain about disposition of the feature. Also, when you open the layer file you can click on list by source and see where the feature actually is.  My original file is in layer form. Can I still add fields from there? ... View more

Replicating topology is a little messy.  After you replicate it the child needs to be verified before it can be edited. Essentially when you replicate the Topology to a child database it is the same as creating new topology on your parent database.  You need to clean it up first.  Also make sure there are the appropriate permissions and extensions on the child I have a point feature class that is stored in a feature dataset and participates in a topology in my parent GDB (SQL Express 2008).  Users can't edit the feature class that is in the replicas.  They get an error message saying they can't edit the topology.  What is the workflow to allow me to continue to have this participate in a topology and be editable in a replica GDB? ... View more

Why not simply add the new attributes to the original shapefle.  Or if you should not do that make a copy of the original shape file and simply add the new attributes. If those are not an option and you have not already added data to the new attribute simply use the data loader in ArcCatalog to load the original data into the new shapefile. I created a layer file with multiple lines, and I need to create new fields for those lines. I decided to create a new shapefile with the necessary fields. How do I transfer the data from my layer file into the new shapefile? There are 500-1,000 lines in the layer file so recreating the entire file would be excruciatingly tedious. ... View more

Air photography is somewhat expensive to acquire and many locations will not do it every year.    I know the air photos for my house on BING are at least 4 or 5 years old because my house is the old color. Sometimes larger metro areas will have air photos updated more often and at a higher resolution. What you have for dates sounds correct. Here are some WMS service I found for Texas. http://data.crwr.utexas.edu/wms.html http://www.texasview.org/ Thank you for all the suggestions guys. I'm Located in Luling, TX.   It's more of a rural area so I know there may not be as many data points to work with but all the help is appreciated. I'm just curious, how often is satellite photography taken? I found google earth has them skipping every few years then 2 in one year as far back as 2011, 2006,2005,2002 then 1995, does that sound right? ... View more

Interesting though.  I think if you had a database that large I think your processor would burn up before you even got close to that . But yes you should  have a utility set up to compress your database every night.  Occasionally you may want to unregister and register as versioned if in SDE every now and then. If I have some reoccurring scripts that keep appending to a feature class, eventually the objectID field will get too high - for example, over 1000 new records every 30 minutes.  Some of the old records are deleted to limit the size of the feature class, but the ObjectID field keeps getting higher and higher.  Theoretically, eventually, the ObjectID field will max out at 2,147,483,648.  What happens then?  Is there any way to reset the field programatically? ... View more

You might try searching the USGS or various agencies that might  have historic data.  Where are you located? I know my state has a WMS server that has options to show our air photography back to 1991 all in one easy to use server. They just added LIDAR recently.  Well actually is a jpeg of the actual lidar data I was wondering if you guys can Please Help me out here. I use ArcGIS for work and mapping Oil field leases and boundary lines. I am looking to add new basemaps to the ArcGIS desktop that shows old satellite imagery over the past several decades and also some topographic data. I believe there is a USA Topographic map available for the online ArcGIS but how can I add this to the desktop program? Thanks ... View more

Consider ArcPad. Your field guys can check out data and make updated in the field.  Bring their device back in and update the data in your GDB. You can create tables with domains such that they pretty much only have choices from drop down menu's for choice then you  can have a comment section. Does that sound like what you are looking for Does anyone have a solution for nested forms in ArcGIS. Problem: There will be 10 field guys with laptops with a stripped down ArcGIS on it. They will click on a point (Pole) and a access database form will appear with nested (relationships?) form for the field guys to fill out. The updating features, all the poles are GPS located in the database and have a xy and pole number. This inventory system will have the field crew out and they will fill in the data asked on the nested form. This data will be "new data" added to access columns and selected from drop downs on the forms. Sometimes, the forms will already have data such as "last maintenance" and the field will be updated with the current date. The current data is in a SQL geodatabase. We are looking for a way to create forms as well as "nested" capabilities, Relationships? Database nested classes are attached below ... View more

You should use the setting to embed the fonts. Play around with the transparency levels. Trying to export mxd as PDF and keep running into this issue (attachment). In short, the basemap and some of the symbology didn't export. Thanks. ... View more