Make time-slider with color symbology for polygons

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05-16-2017 03:16 PM
KateBallard
New Contributor II

I am working on a thesis where I have data from 2000-2015 that shows lyme disease cases by county for each year. This data has been joined with a county shapefile and I used graded colors based on number of cases/county. I want to use a Time Slider to show the progression each year, and I had to put all the years in one dbf and "transpose" them to get the years in one column (losing the graded colors). Now I have the time slider set up, but I am trying to figure out how to create graded colors again for each county (separated by year) so that the spread can be shown over time using the slider, but I cannot figure out how to do that. I have attached a photo of what the new time slider (aka transposed) attribute table looks like. If you were to scroll down it would continue on showing each county's data. How can I create graded colors from this? (It is already joined with the county shapefile). My second to last picture shows what the graded colors section looked like before I transposed the data and included all 15 years worth of data, instead of just one (in order to use the timeslider). The graded colors section no longer worked when all 15 years were present and transposed. So, instead I had to use the "unique values" option under Categories and use a color ramp, but then what I got is shown in the last picture. I am wondering how to basically get the same results as I did before transposing and when there was only one year's data present, but I want it to show for every year so I can make the time slider. 

Instead of allowing me to make ranges to correlate with different case numbers, now each individual value it listed and I cannot create ranges.

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10 Replies
DanPatterson_Retired
MVP Emeritus
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XanderBakker
Esri Esteemed Contributor

The year field will be enough to make the time slider work based on a single "date" field. Also the cases field that you have (I assume it has value different than 0 further along the table) can be used to create the graded color. In fact the good thing of doing this uniformly for the entire temporal dataset is that each year in the time animation will use the same scale of colors and you can really compare the different years in time.

What range of values do you have in the cases field?

KateBallard
New Contributor II

They range from 0 to around 1000. The problem is that when I try to create a graded color scale, I instead get something that looks like the photo I just added to my original post, and it does not let me create "ranges" to symbolize certain colors like I did before the data table was transposed. For example 0=lightest, 1-25 =light purple, ..... 700-1000=darkest. 

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DanPatterson_Retired
MVP Emeritus

In the top photo, you have 7 classes and a purple color ramp.  Choose an interesting color ramp and increase the number of classes if that is what you want

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KateBallard
New Contributor II

I cant use classes anymore, because of the new way the data is organized and that there are 15 years worth of data for each county instead of 1 (which was the case when I successfully made the first one for 2015). Now, I have to use "Unique values" under "Categories" instead of "Graded colors" under "Quantities" (under graded colors now the value options just say 'none'). Because of this now, I dont have the option to create classes (shown in the last photo). I am wondering how to either make the values work again under "graded colors" so that I can use the classes option and make them into ranges, or make this all work that way under "categories". The issue is just that now the data has been transposed, so instead of me having individual maps where each one just had a field called Cases2015 or Cases 2014, and etc with each corresponded to a county, now, there is one field called years which contains all the years and then a column for counties, but instead of there being a single county row and then case # values under each year, each county has a row for every year. So, for example, there will be a row for Weston county in 2015 with the number of cases that year, Weston in 2014 with the number for that year and so on, as shown in the first picture. 

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XanderBakker
Esri Esteemed Contributor

You should not be using Unique values for this type of data, but graduated colors. If the system does not allow you to do so, you should revise the type of field. (it might not be numerical but string). In that case, create a new numerical field and cast the values to this new field and symbolize on that new field.

KateBallard
New Contributor II

Thank you! I can't believe I missed that. Now that I got that to work, the graded colors are only showing up for the first year (2000) in the time slider. It definitely can tell the difference between the year's data because the 2000 map here on the time slider matches my original year 2000 map. I tried to flip through the time slider and set the symbology for each year, but that did not work. Do you have any idea what I could do to solve this problem? 

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FC_Basson
MVP Regular Contributor

Have you converted the YEAR and CASES fields to type INTEGER like Xander suggested?  From your screenshot it is clear that they are of type TEXT, because of the left alignment in the table column - numerical values are right-aligned.

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KateBallard
New Contributor II

Yes I did. Now Im just having that issue where the graded colors only show up for the first year.

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