If you’re using the Attribute Assistant, we need your help!

[MikeMillerGIS]

We’re doing some research into how the Attribute Assistant is being used. We’d like to see what rules you are using and how you configured your dynamic value table. 

This information will help us plan for the future. We want to know what are the most common rules.  We also want to see your gnarly and complicated rules to see how far the Attribute Assistant is being pushed.

So please share your dynamic value table along with any comments you have in this thread. We appreciate your help on this effort!

Thanks,

Mike

ArcGIS Solutions

PS: If you don’t know what the Attribute Assistant is (or aren’t sure if you are using it already) no worries.  You can learn more about Attribute Assistant on the ArcGIS Solution site here. 

[SSMIC3038]

I'll look into those suggestions, thanks!

I also value real world examples to help spark some ideas in my own world, so I plan on looking at peoples spreadsheets, thanks to all that provided them.

[JessicaGould]

We've been using the Attribute Assistant for about 4+ years at Philadelphia Water and are very grateful for it.  I think there's a lot more we could be/should be doing with it.  We are using it mostly for generating unique IDs and well as grabbing attributes of intersecting features.  Thanks, Mike for all of your work on it.  If I'm remembering correctly, we had to make 2 configuration changes: 

Timestamp - we do not want to capture the time, just the date

Intersecting_Layer_Details - do not want to capture the name of the layer in ArcMap, but rather the name of the feature class

[JoePlattner]

I'm the attribute assistant's biggest fan! We've been using it for years to update our Public Works data, but haven't kept up on many of the recent updates.

The biggest enhancement I would hope for going forward is the extending of this functionality to ArcGIS online.

It's so interesting browsing through everyone's thoughts and sample tables.

[RobertHarris5]

We have been using the attribute assistant for two years at Norwich Public Utilities for our gas, water and sewer geometric network editing.

We are using it to automate some attribute completion based on intersecting edges, autonumber unique ID's, and copy abandoned pipes/assets to an abandoned layer.

I would love to see an entire abandonment workflow developed here. This would include copying the feature to the abandoned layer, then removing the existing feature as part of the workflow.

An issue that I have had is with the Prompt command. For example when merging two line segments into one, you are prompted for which pipe attributes you want to keep. The prompt command causes a generic ID to be displayed which causes confusion for our editors.

Is anyone here running 'On Manual' changes through a script? Here's an example..

We capture a gas leak point using Collector (No AA rules work here.) There is no relationship between the leak and a particular pipe segment at this point in time. I would like to run an automated 'on manual' job that uses nearest feature attributes to populate the pipename field in the gas leak feature class. (without opening ArcGIS for Desktop) Hence creating a reportable relationship.

[AliciaShyu_Love]

Hi Michael,

In Columbia County we use AA almost on a daily basis when creating and editing features. Currently, I'm working on ROW polygons and AA has helped save to much time. Aside from tracking the editor and date of the last edit, we also use it to link other documents that are related to the project, such as plan sheet/set and deeds. I agree with another user that is hard to find the AA, since it's packaged with the Water Network. The only reason we started using it here, is because I learned about this extremely useful tool at a previous job.

[RichardRahe]

The Attribute Assistant is a great tool and has really helped me with the recent deployment of the LGIM. Currently I have been working to set up generated ID for the different assets in our water, sanitary and storm water systems.  As well as using the equations to determine the slope for gravity mains and elevations for manholes.  Most of this is standard for AA.  Currently I'm not being too creative in the early stage but I can see different areas in the town’s data in which AA will help to keep data consistent and eliminate some data entry errors.  Looking forward to see what others are doing with AA and maybe get some tips and tricks.

[deleted-user-9Hxc6lamKUtl]

Michael,

We utilize the Attribute Assistant in Lewis and Clark County/City of Helena to assist with maintaining our address and road features. Attribute Assistant is also used by our City Utilities Department in conjunction with Cityworks, with both tables (DynamicValue and GenerateID) being used. An AssetID field is referenced to incrementally assign an ID to the respective Utilities feature. The Attribute Assistant has been an extremely helpful tool to improve efficiency when creating new or updated address and road features. Multiple fields are automatically calculated when a new address or road is created or updated. We really appreciate this tool, and look forward to any future updates and/or capabilities! We also created a presentation for a recent regional conference showcasing the capabilities – let me know if you’d like me to email the Powerpoint!

Jason Danielson

[ClintMiller]

Hi Mike,

  We are a Water  / Waste water utility operator and have have been using Attribute Assistant for several years now. Attribute Assistant has been a tremendous help in our day to day creation and editing of  our assets. We use AA to auto-populate facility IDs of water mains, valves, hydrants and fittings. We also use it to populate info from other attached assets such as up and down stream manhole IDs when adding sewer lines, pull up and down stream invert elevations from MHs to add to sewer mains, and even an expression to populate slope from those elevations.

  Some of the capability that we would like to see, is an ability to generate a facility ID and the other field populations and calculations when field staff collect data with the AGOL Collector application in the field. Also would be nice is the ability to populate attribute fields based spatial location, such if a FH falls in a particular pressure zone, or water quality zone based on it's spatial location.This would greatly reduce time spent editing and adding data for GIS editors in the office.

Thanks for continuing to develop the Attribute Assistant tool, it is a huge time saver for us in the trenches!

Attached is a copy of our Dynamic Value and GenerateID table to use and share if anyone finds something useful to them.

Thanks Again!

Clint Miller

GIS Analyst - KGISD

City of Lawrence - Utilities Dept.

cmiller@lawrenceks.org

[AlisonGaiser1]

Here at the City of Ottawa we make use of AA extensively. We use it mainly for roads, addresses, sewer and water data editing. It is also in use for other departments for items such as created_by, created_date, modified_by, modified_date and the creation of unique IDs.

We work in Oracle and SDE and have found that this sometimes introduces issues. We have two outstanding NIMS ( NIM100667 and NIM100535 ) that are related to the creation of duplicate IDs when using the Generate_ID method in Oracle. It would be great to see these fixed as we have had to implement custom code to work around them. You will see the custom method in the attached file - GENERATE_STRUCT_ID.

One big complaint we get from the users is the look of the icon that AA uses. They find it difficult to tell if it is on or off. As part of their workflow they sometimes have to turn AA off, so that it does not fire in specific situations. In the past they used the prompting of the location of the log file as an indicator that they had AA running. I am told that this prompt is now gone in 10.3, so that is no longer an option. I had posted a geonet question to see if the icon could be changed, but did not get any response (Can we change the Attribute assistant icons?

I would say that one of the things we use extensively is the  COPY_LINKED_RECORD method as we have a legacy system that is used to maintain our road names and addresses. This method allows our users to find the information from that Oracle based system and populate the information in Esri.

We have created a few custom methods. One is mentioned above. The second is  called GENERATE_SERVICE_POINTS for the creation of small services for our Water utility group. The third is called MOVE_BY_DRAG_AND_DROP.

One other minor item I find frustrating it trying to find the help for AA. If I follow the link that Michael supplied at the top of the page, I get to the overview of AA, but from there I can't get to the documentation that describes how to use the Value methods. I always have to go back and google to find it.

Thanks,

   Alison

[ElisabettaDeGironimo]

It's a great tool!  But I'd love to see the Expression method be able to use python as well as VBscript.  Thanks!