Because we use ArcGIS Online Web Maps in our daily work-flows, I created an AGO group that contains Feature Layers that are links to our self-hosted ArcGIS Server services. This way, users can quickly add data from our ArcGIS Server Site and not have to look up URLs/Usernames/Passwords (I’ve save the username/password as part of the ArcGIS Online service when appropriate). But I’ve had a problem where if I change the service, the changes are not reflected in the AGO Feature Layer for that service and I have to monkey about to get the changes to migrate to the maps.

A while ago I posted a work-around for a problem I was having with a Web AppBuilder application. Working with Esri tech support, we determined what I was doing to cause the problem. In my config.json, I was using a relative path to the proxy. Note that I had the proxy as a separate application at the root level of our domain because I intended to have a shared proxy for all of our applications instead of individual ones.

Recently I’ve created Python add-ins for data entry for our staff. Most of these have a toolbar with a ‘Help’ button that opens a help file in .pdf format.Sample python add-in toolbar. The first add-in was for ArcCatalog and this worked splendidly. I was using os.startfile(path to help.pdf). However, when I started doing ArcMap add-ins, clicking the Help button would open the help.pdf but ArcMap would crash. Oops! Luckily the Python development team at Esri already had a blog post about this at their ArcPy Café blog.

I was recently re-evaluating our back-up procedures and discovered and found a nasty bug with the arcpy’s ListFeatureClasses request. If you have a feature class in a feature dataset with the same name, ListFeatureClasses may not find it or anything else in that feature dataset. Unfortunately, we recently made our daily backup a python-based system that uses ListFeatureClasses and got bit by this bug. After discovering missing data in our backups, I reconstructed what happened and found this bug.

Awhile ago, I had a ArcSDE problem that required ESRI technical support to help trouble-shoot. The problem was odd but was resolved by rebooting the server. During the process, though, the support person had me set a couple of environment variables for logging SDE activity on the client machine. The settings were SDEINTERCEPT and SDEINTERCEPTLOC. From ESRI’s Help, SDEINTERCEPT specifies what activity to log and SDEINTERCEPTLOC specifies where to save the log files.

Almost a year ago, I updated ERSI’s Domain Sort code for VB 6 to work with ArcGIS 10. Recently, I had a comment that this Add-In caused ArcCatalog to explode if you had an open OLE connection. When I tested it, it turned out the reports were accurate. I got around to adding in a Try-Catch around the offending chunk of code & it is now better than ever. You can download just the Add-In or the Add-In with source code or get it from ESRI’s ArcGIS Resource Center.

I have been working on a python script that I want (NEED) to run as a scheduled task on a remote machine. I got to the point that the script did exactly what I needed when I was interactively running it in a Windows session but had problems when running it as a scheduled task. The debugging process was cumbersome–make a change, schedule a task to run it, log out of the machine, and wait.

Random luck me to discovering a bug related to feature classes whose names start with ‘nd_'. It appears that you are allowed to create feature classes starting with ‘nd_’ but ArcCatalog will not display them. Further research shows this behavior also occurs for table and for ArcSDE (PostGres) geodatabases, personal geodatabase, and file geodatabases–I am using ArcCatalog 10.0. I first noticed something odd was occurring while importing a series of shapefiles into a geodatabases.

One of the Spatial Analyst tools we often use in ArcGIS is the Extract Values to Points tool. This allows us to take a point file (well locations in our case) and attach a value (elevations) from a raster image (a DEM) to each point. Today I was running it for the first time against an Image Service we recently published and I received a warning message,‘WARNING 000957: Skipping feature(s) because of NULL or EMPTY geometry’.

To better organize our ArcSDE data, we wanted to create multiple geodatabases and multiple ArcSDE services using one PostgreSQL database cluster (a cluster containing 1 machine at this point). A side question is why can’t tables and raster be placed in Feature Datasets? This wouldn’t be an end-all solution for what we want to do but there are some messy consequences of this limitation. ESRI has instructions on Setting up multiple geodatabases in one PostgreSQL database cluster on Windows which was helpful but we repeatedly got an ‘The ArcSDE Repository was unsuccessfully completed.