Latest Contributions by RonnieRichards

Agreed who chose and applied that terrible naming convention "_V" ? In our shop we use a similar naming standard like the author and it is annoying to hack the geodatabase to change the names of all the views. This causes a complete mess if unregisteration occurs causing a bunch of work that really should be controlled.  Why not add a DBTUNE parameter that we can control? Isn't that what this is configuration is intended for...  Also agreed on the visibility of these items in Catalog, it was nice to be able to see them in 10.0 why are removing things that were just fine? Or at least explain your reasoning for doing so in release notes if this is such an improvement.  ... View more

I agree with the author. Relationship classes are rather pointless since none of the ESRI templates for Flex or Silverlight or even the old WebADF took advantage or exposed them. Reviewing api documentation it appears there are plenty of programming opportunities for them but that is a rather steep learning curve for most users.  At this point they are the ONLY solution to maintain referential integrity in a geodatabase yet they are not very useful otherwise. Relationship classes are nice for editing workflows but exposing them to applications out-of-the-box into the templates available today or even ArcGIS online seems be lacking. ... View more

I agree with the author that the explorer folder shortcut type should be recognized. As an educator with students in front of ArcGIS they get confused in the various dialogs. in ArcMap the open map dialog is much different from the rest of Add Data, Toolbox choose workspace (folder) dialogs and the folder connections concept.  A map dialog can browser ANY location Windows Explorer supports .lnk, direct UNC entry.  Add Data only uses Folder Connections which has a purpose but cannot replace folder links which can be grouped and named unlike folder connections.  When overloading ArcCatalog with Folder Connections (20+) , most of which are UNC pathes for some reason my ArcCatalog runs much slower when . Windows Explorer never has this problem browsing to locations so maybe performance could be another reason to support explorer shortcuts. ... View more

You might consider the Atteribute Assistant Add-In it has an ID Generator function which is quite flexible. The Attribute Assistant is not the easiest add-in to find... typically it is bundled with the LocalGovernment sample templates.  I wish we could have unique indexes on columns in our versioned data because what prevents you or another user duplicating the ID using the existing workflow? However this is another issue that has been around for a while and also exists as an arcgis idea...  ... View more

We too are having problems updating the data behind a hosted feature service using the overwrite existing service option. We have been struggling with this for months and the only work-a-round we found was to delete the service and republish as others suggested on this thread. We use SDE for all of our data sources before they go out to feature services. There does not seem to be a way to automate the "Data" side to all of this. The delete and append features tool do not appear to work against service url's. I wish we could just use gdb replication or better yet simply dropping a FGDB out on AGOL org. ... View more

Ok in concept that might be possible but both templates do not approach the application the same way. They appear to have different authors. If you expect users to be obtain code and inject code from other templates the application approach, configuration and setup of the templates needs to be identical. Something I have yet to see between any of them. Also recently the basic_viewer no longer appears to support being hosted outside of AGOL. Today I downloaded the basic viewer and legend and the basic viewer is throwing errors when not being hosted by AGOL. This template comes up with 404 errors and it seems to happen in this section of app.js. But if you look at Legend it does not even contain an app.js. again different authors is not going to allow users to reuse template code with easse. line 52 (app.js)          //Check to see if the app is hosted on arcgis.com. If the app is hosted then set the arcgisUrl to the proper environment (dev, qa, production).               //Also set the proxy to the Arcgis.com proxy.               //If the app isn't hosted or the user has specified a proxy url or geometry service url then use the user-defined values ... View more

I agree SDE Connections need to be improved. The current procedure is difficult and does not work well for many reasons as the author explains. Why not create a data source connection manager in the MXD where we can manage the various data sources including multiple sde connections? Many will say to use the Data Source manager tool in ArcCatalog by right clicking on the .mxd but even this tool does not work properly in 10.1. It has been around since 9.3 and still does not deal with SDE connections correctly.   I did author a tool years ago that might help you. Several users have emailed me they use my tool to break their mxd's and fix the sources in the new mxd which is much easier than repathing. Unfortunately you would need to wait for the mxd to open to repath your data...  http://resources.arcgis.com/gallery/file/geoprocessing/details?entryID=56FA061F-1422-2418-A076-D0B56BCD8745 ... View more

Please do this especially since the register geodatabase option in ArcGIS Server 10.1 ONLY supports .sde connection files! So it seems SDE Workgroup users have to create .sde connections now anyways . As the author suggests this is rundant and a confusing process for new sde users.  ... View more

Please also improve this situation in Arcpy. I wish would also report a schema lock but instead it reports it cannot create the output feature class or table. Even with overwriteoutput = true there are times when a single user environment creates schema locks and arcpy does not report the correct error. Instead we start chasing down overwriteoutput options when it is not the real issue or cause of the error.   ... View more

I do not recall when overWriteouput was introduced but you might be able to simply place this at the top of your script. This environment setting allows overwriting existing outputs. http://webhelp.esri.com/arcgisdesktop/9.3/index.cfm?TopicName=OverwriteOutput%20method If that does not exist in 9.1, you might be able to use the Delete command and then when you recreate the feature class has already been deleted? Hope this helps Ron ... View more