Tag Archives: Beta

Here at Esri, we always try to help one another out.  Well the Local Government team asked if we could expand the functionality of the Attribute Assistant and make a series of construction tools to help with address data management workflows; and we obliged.  We came up with some pretty cool new rules for the attribute assistant and some interesting construction tools that will be used to streamline address maintenance workflows.  Even though these have been designed for managing address information, you may find them very helpful.  Let’s first take a look at these new attribute assistant rules.
The first rule we needed to create was CASCADE_ATTRIBUTE.  This rule will allow you to make a change to an attribute in a table or layer and push that new attribute value to every feature that contains the value. So in the address world, we have implemented a Master Street Name table.  Say a road was renamed, we can go into the table, change the road name, and the rule will open up the Road Centerline layer and make that change to every road with the old name, then open up the Site Address Point Layer and update the road name as well.  Pretty cool, huh?
The second rule we created was VALIDATE_ATTRIBUTE_LOOKUP.  This rule will validate an attribute change against a look up table or layer.  Let’s look out how you would use this in address land.  If I created a new road and I want to make sure the road name matches a road in the Master Street Name table, I can set this rule up to monitor my Street Name field and check that value against the Master Street Name table.  The cool thing about this rule is all I have to do is enter a piece of the road information.  If it finds more than one record in the street name table, it presents a prompt, where you can select any of the matching values.  How is that for data validation?
I also mentioned we are working on some new construction tools.  These are still in development, but here is what we are working towards.  One tool will allow the user to click a reference point, in our case, an address point that represents the location on the centerline of which the address is derived, create this point if it does not exist, then create a series of site address points with information from that reference point or the centerline underneath it.  So basically, you can create a series of points all with information from source point.  The second is a tool to draw a new road and split any intersecting roads and prorate their address information.
If you want to try the new rules out, as well as a few other enhancements, we have posted a beta of the tools on the forum.
Thanks
Mike from the Water Team