In migrating a toolbar consisting of a button and a couple of tools for use in ArcMap 10, I decided to take advantage of the ease of deployment enabled by add-ins which was introduced in 10.0. So far, I’m loving the functionality. One thing, however, that I have to figure out is that the controls are not instantiated until they are clicked on. One of the results is that the controls, by default, are enabled.

I have been loading existing raster data into a geodatabase to be included in a new Mosaic Dataset–a very cool and useful addition to ArcGIS 10. The most time-consuming part of the process for the human (at least this human) has been getting the names of the rasters right. Our existing data is organized by tiles with the directory name representing the tile name and then the data within each tile directory having the same name.

Whenever I want to skim through ESRI’s fonts to find some symbology I need for a specific purpose, I go through some laborious process to skim the fonts searching for an adequate symbol. However, in the ESRI Mapping Center blog post, user use2b311 post a link to a pre-made pdf showing ESRI Font Samples.pdf (application/pdf Object). Back when ESRI use to actually print hard-copy manuals, there were similar diagrams available but either I haven’t searched enough of they don’t exist in the digital help systems so I was happy to stumble upon this.

I’ve seen several posts like this one that reiterate that ESRI has announced that: ‘As of the end of January, ArcGIS Online basemaps published and hosted by Esri are now freely available to all users regardless of commercial, noncommercial, internal, or external use. This means that you no longer have to pay a subscription fee for including ArcGIS Online basemaps in your commercial-use web applications. Basemaps included in this new business model are World Imagery Map, World Street Map, World Topographic Map, USA Topographic Maps, and DeLorme World Basemap.

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.

I was working my way through this ESRI Walkthrough: Building custom UI elements using add-ins (ArcObjects .NET 10 SDK). And came across a couple minor errors that I had to correct during the process. First, while implementing the OnClick() code for ZoomToLayer.vb, Visual Studio gave me a ‘Name ‘ArcMap’ is not declared.' error. In the walk-through, they mention that the ArcMap method of your class. For me, however, it appeared under the .

Ever since the ever-popular post, Zipping a shapefile using python, came out, people have been asking (one person, yesterday) for a sample of how to zip a file geodatabase using python. The key trick, as shown in line 17, is appending the basename of the file geodatabase (‘nfg.gdb/’ in my example) in front of each file as you write it to the zipfile. UPDATE: WordPress messes with the spacing when I post code, making it difficult to post code that can just be copied & pasted and have work.

We finally installed an instance of ArcSDE 10 today. My first attempt at connecting in ArcCatalog 9.3.1 failed with the following error: Failed to connect to the specified server. This release of the GeoDatabase is either invalid or out of date. [Please run the ArcSDE setup utility using the -o install option.] DBMS table not found [sde.sde.GDB_Release]  Turns out the solution was simple, this article points out that Service pack 2 is required.

Since the name of the blog is Node Dangles, I get several hits daily from searches on ‘Node Dangles’ and I have no information on node dangles. This post is the first in a series to change that. First let us, by us, I mean ESRI, define what a node dangle is. Their online glossary actually defines a dangling arc, a dangling node is a node (endpoint of an arc) that does the non-connecting mentioned below:

Related to my post on how I enable a script to accept parameters from different sources, I also often set up pythons scripts to output information a variety of ways. This is largely due to the fact that some are called by ArcToolbox scripts. Running in ESRI’s domain, these scripts need to send the output through the arcgisscripting object but if you are running the python outside the ArcGIS framework, you can just print.