Latest Contributions by NathanHeick

Let me add that I think that most of the beauty in story maps comes from the underlying content.  Beautiful pictures make a big difference, without any customization at all.  That's really the first step of getting the most out of the story maps.  Next, CSS style changes give you more control over the presentation.  Finally, modifying the HTML and JavaScript let you change the style and behavior of the app.  For example, if you click on Scholl Canyon Landfill on my app, it turns on a layer unique to that facility.  Remember, many of Esri's story map gallery applications are not custom, but they have really good photographs and good stories to tell. Try this out yourself and let me know if you have any issues. Nathan ... View more

Hi Nono, Earlier this year, I was in the same situation as you.  I wanted to make a good looking story map with a lot of the cool features other people have employed.  Initially, I had not previously done any customizations.  There are two options here, download the ready-to-deploy app or download the source code here.  The easiest way is to download the ready-to deploy app.  If you unzip the application and open up index.html, Esri developers have left a spot for us to make CSS style changes to the application.   With these style changes, you can do a lot to change the appearance of the app. <style>     /* CUSTOM CSS RULES */ </style>‍‍‍‍‍‍ You want to set the background image of the top portion of the application which is the element with id="header".  To do this, you can do the following: <style>     /* CUSTOM CSS RULES */     #header {         background-image: url("resources/banner.jpg");         background-size: 100% 100%;     } </style>‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍ You need to add the CSS rule above to index.html and save your banner image in the resources folder of the application as "banner.jpg".  You could also pass in a URL to the image if it is hosted somewhere else. Then, you will need to deploy the app on a web server.  If that sounds like too much, this would be very easy for a web developer in your IT department.  If you want to make changes beyond just style changes, you would need to download the source code, modify it, and compile it using Node.JS and Grunt. Currently, I have a development version of the app I am working on here: https://d315r0g26gh8i4.cloudfront.net/ This link will eventually go away, but the production app will be named Facilities and will be under the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts AGOL organizational account under my username.  I started out really simple and then continued to make more and more changes.  I even tweaked the mobile layout.  I will say that the CSS changes provide the most bang for the buck.  I added about 4 CSS changes at the beginning and it really improved the app. I hope that helps. Nathan ... View more

As an SDE Administrator, I used this tool regularly and it should be a standard tool. ... View more

I think your error is related to line 255 or a combination of 252 and 255.  I think Popen is trying to open a file that has already been closed. Try using os.system(fileopen) instead or do more research on that error, reportlab, WxPython, and Popen.  I think there may be multiple threads trying to access the same file at the same time. Nathan ... View more

You need to find a debugging method to isolate the problem to a specific line.  Can you launch your application from a command line and print to stdout?  At the least, you could always write to a file.  You should be able to wrap the cursor in a try-except block and write the rows and any error messages to stdout or a file.  I suspect the cursor may be fine and the report is choking on the records you pass into it for certain searches. Nathan ... View more

I would try removing the sql_clause and retesting it. Nathan ... View more

I had similar issues while publishing a feature service from ArcGIS Desktop 10.1 from file geodatabase data to ArcGIS Online.  I was able to fix the problem by making two changes.  First of all, the data is on a mapped network drive.  I had no problem publishing this feature service to AGOL from ArcGIS Desktop using Share as Service.  However, when automating the process, the StageService tool wouldn't consolidate the data.  I fixed that partially by using UNC paths instead of mapped drives in the .mxd.  We have had to do that on other feature services to publish to AGOL.  Second, the StageService tool seems to prefer absolute paths.  I got it to work with both mapped drives and full UNC paths, however, the .mxd still needed to use UNC paths.  Therefore, I settled on UNC paths for both for simplicity.  Many of the arcpy.mapping tools gave me no issues with using relative paths and writing to the current directory using just the filename.  I suspect that the StageService tool does a lot of data path validation and, under certain circumstances, ends up comparing a UNC path to a mapped network drive path, and rejects them even though they represent the same resource. ... View more

Right now, I'm dealing with symptoms that are common to several threads related to the Publishing Tools service.  The problem I was facing is that I could not publish services from ArcMap to an administrative ArcGIS Server connection using port 6080 in ArcGIS for Server 10.2.1.  First, here are the ideas I read: 1.     You have to make your ArcGIS Server connection in ArcMap using the Web Adaptor URL. 2.     You have to enable administrative access through the Web Adaptor. 3.     The System folder is locked for some reason and you have to make it public. However, after lengthy testing, my findings were as follows: 1.     You can make a publisher or administrator connection to ArcGIS Server through the Web Adaptor or the GIS Server tier.  However, when you try to publish a service, ArcMap needs access to the Publishing Tools service. 2.     If the System folder is unlocked (anonymous authentication), you can publish a service no matter how you connect to ArcGIS Server from ArcMap.  If the System folder is locked you have to authenticate through the Web Adaptor.  This is true if you used roles or any logged in user to set the security on that folder.  Your connection to ArcGIS Server does not automatically connect you to the Publishing Tools service.  You either have to be anonymous or go through the Web Adaptor. 3.     The System folder was locked on our server for some reason.  This may have happened automatically when we enabled Web Tier authentication.  Maybe it is a bug.  No matter what, it got locked, which starts the whole problem.  If you're unaware of this, your only chance of publishing a service would be through the Web Adaptor. 5.     The following causes the most confusion of all.  If you started out using the GIS Server URL, you cannot switch to the Web Adaptor URL unless administrative access is enabled on the Web Adaptor.  To make an administrative or publisher connection, ArcMap tries to connect to the Web Adaptor.  If administrative access is disabled through the Web Adaptor, ArcMap will revert back to the old GIS Server URL behind your back.  The problem is that ArcMap lets you click apply to change the URL, but changes it back after you close the connection dialog.  It seems to check the URL after you close it, not when you click apply or right before it closes.  That is a design flaw in ArcMap.  It should give you an error message that administrative access is disabled through the Web Adaptor.  At this point, your only hope would be to enable administrative access through the Web Adaptor and add a role you are a member of to the System folder security settings, all of which you're unlikely to figure out on your own. 6.     Thus, if the System folder is unlocked you can connect to ArcGIS Server anyway you want to publish a service.  If the System folder is locked, you have to have proper credentials to the System folder, enable administrative access through the Web Adaptor, and connect through the Web Adaptor to publish a service. 7.     Apparently, to lock down both the Systems folder and administrative access through the Web Adaptor, you would have to publish your services through ArcGIS Server Manager while connected to the GIS Server tier.  Otherwise, to publish through ArcGIS Desktop, you would have to choose between one or the other. ... View more