Tag Archives: ArcGIS 10
ArcGIS 10.0 Service Pack 5 Released
Service Pack 5 for ArcGIS 10.0 has been released. Please visit the ArcGIS Resource Center Blog for more information about this release: ArcGIS 10.0 Service Pack 5.
This service pack is available for download via the ArcGIS Resource Center: ArcGIS 10.0 SP5 (Desktop, Engine, and Server)
For the best experience, please download this service pack at your earliest convenience.
Service packs for other products include:
5 Minute Troubleshooting: Unable to Export Event Layer to Shapefile
As we all know there is no “magic” button in ArcGIS for Desktop that will fix all the issues that you are having. In my time working in support, however, I have found that exporting data comes quite close and often returns magical results when working with corrupted data. Today we will be looking at using this method to resolve issues with an X,Y Event Layer.
Have you ever had an event layer show up beautifully in your map, but when exporting it to a shapefile you ran into an issue? Some of these issues could be receiving an error (such as “the data you are exporting contains one or more blob field”), getting a blank attribute table, or finding that not all of your fields are coming through to the shapefile. The steps below work, in most instances, to help resolve this issue. These steps walk you through the process of exporting a table to a DBF, displaying that DBF as an event layer, and then exporting that event layer to a shapefile.
More Changes to Enhance Your Experience
As part of our ongoing effort to improve the search experience on the Esri Support website, we have made a few changes we hope you’ll find enhance your user-experience on the site.
We have removed the option to include ArcGIS 10 content from the search, as all version 10 content will now be included by default.
While searching for a term within the GIS Dictionary, the search results page will now return all results from that repository by default instead of users having to click “In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries…”.
We have also made some changes to the way we tag our content that will make it easier to find priority content.
Rating the article on the Technical Article feedback form is now optional.
Your feedback is very important to us, so if you have any questions, concerns or suggestions, please let us know by using the “Contact Us” link at the bottom of the page.
Check out what other changes we’ve made recently, and keep an eye out for even more changes coming soon.
Online Support Resources Team
Easily clip an entire workspace for a specific study area
Imagine you’re the GIS Data Manager for New York City and receive a request for data from a consultant for Central Park. The data request included roads, streams, soils, buildings and other feature classes that are stored in the master geodatabase for the city. Instead of providing the entire geodatabase, you clip the data down to just the park boundary.
In order to clip the data, you have the options to clip the features individually or set up a batch clip. However, there’s a more efficient way. With the iterator functionality available in ArcGIS 10, a simple model using the Iterate Feature Class iterator and the Clip tool can provide an efficient way to extract the subset of data.
Within ModelBuilder add the Iterate Feature iterator (Insert Menu > Iterators > Feature Classes) and the Clip tool. Connect the iterator output feature class as the input to the Clip tool.
Below are the parameters that can be specified for each of the components.
- Iterate Feature Classes
- Workspace or Feature Dataset
- Wildcard
- Feature Type
- Recursive
- Clip
- Input Features
- Clip Features
- Output Feature Class
- XY Tolerance
For the clip output feature class, you can use a variable based upon the name being generated from the iterator. An example of this can be seen in the interface below with the percent symbols.
Examples of inline model variable substitution
Based upon the variable for the output feature class name, the output of the model keeps the original name with ‘_clip’ added on.
After setting up the model and defining the desired parameters, this process can be accessed from your toolbox to easily clip a workspace or feature dataset for any project requiring you to work with only a subset of you master data.
The above model example can be downloaded from the ArcGIS Geoprocessing Model and Script Tool Gallery: Clip Workspace.
Timothy H., Support Analyst – Geodata Raster Group, Esri Support Services – Charlotte, NC
ArcGIS 10.0 Service Pack 2 Released
We are pleased to announce that Service Pack 2 for ArcGIS 10.0 is now available to download.
This release contains performance improvements, maintenance fixes and includes all updates delivered since ArcGIS 10.0. The English version is available today and other language-specific packs will be available soon.
We recommend that customers using ArcGIS products at version 10.0 or 10.0 SP1 download and install this service pack at their earliest convenience to ensure the highest-quality experience when working with the software.
If you have any questions or run into issues with the installation, please contact Esri Technical Support at 1-888-377-4575, option 2, or visit the Support site. Users outside the United States should contact their local distributor for help.
ArcGIS 10 (Desktop, Engine, Server) Service Pack 2 Announcement
What Do I Put in My Metadata?
Metadata may not be the most exciting thing in the GIS world, but it is one of the most important. Without properly documented metadata, datasets – and the analysis that occurs on them – are practically useless. It’s essential to know the source and intended uses of all data being used in a GIS analysis. In short, it’s crucial to know your data.
In ArcGIS 10, metadata workflows have changed quite a bit compared to previous versions. For more information regarding metadata in ArcGIS 10, see “A New Approach for Metadata with ArcGIS 10 Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.”
One of the most common questions we get in support is: “How do I know what to put in the metadata?” The answer depends on a number of things, most notably, what type of metadata is being created. The type of metadata created depends on what metadata style is specified in the ArcCatalog Options dialog. See the help here for more information on how to set the metadata style.
A simple way to determine what you need to enter when you’re authoring metadata is to look at what’s displayed in the context help at the bottom of the ArcCatalog window. For instance, as shown below, when the cursor is placed under Description in the Item Description section of metadata created using the North American Profile of ISO 19115 2003, the context help will produce a message that indicates what type of information is expected.
The above message outlined in red indicates that information included in the Description of the metadata should be similar to information included in an abstract.
In some cases, the Context Tip may not offer enough guidance. That’s when it’s time to refer to published content standards. These content standards are a wealth of information regarding what can be included in metadata. All content standards, including FGDC, North American Profile of ISO and INSPIRE are available on the Web.
For more information, please review the links below.
The FGDC Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata
The North American Profile of ISO 19115:2003
The documentation for the INSPIRE Metadata Regulation
What happened to the Spatial Analyst toolbar?
One of the things you may have noticed after upgrading to ArcGIS 10 is that the Spatial Analyst toolbar looks a little different. Sure, the Contour and Histogram tools are still there, but you may be asking, “Where are the other tools that were under the Spatial Analyst menu?”
ArcGIS 10 Spatial Analyst Toolbar
ArcGIS 9.3.1 Spatial Analyst Toolbar
The tools can now be directly accessed through ArcToolbox instead of the toolbar. This change makes the tools easily accessed through the Python environment. It also enables the environment settings to be set from a single location, whereas Spatial Analyst at 9.3.1 had its own environment settings. With everything in one location, the Spatial Analyst Tools can access the additional geoprocessing benefits.
You can also customize the Spatial Analyst toolbar to create a menu similar to that of the previous version. See Adding and removing tools on menus and toolbars for more information on customizing toolbars.
Remember, the toolbar will remain grayed out until raster data is added to the map, since it’s not functional with vector data. The Spatial Analyst Tools are still accessible from ArcToolbox when the toolbar is grayed out, though, as long as the extension has been activated.
Check out the related links below for additional information on the Spatial Analyst toolbar.
-Timothy H., Support Analyst – Geodata Raster Group, Esri Support Services – Charlotte, NC
Related Links:
Capabilities of the Spatial Analyst toolbox
Accessing the Spatial Analyst toolbox and tools
Working with the Spatial Analyst toolbar
ArcGIS 9.3.1 Service Pack 2 Desktop Layer Packaging Patch is now available
The ArcGIS 9.3.1 Service Pack 2 Desktop Layer Packaging Patch is now available for download from the ArcGIS Resource Center. The download URL is http://resources.arcgis.com/content/patches-and-service-packs?fa=viewPatch&PID=17&MetaID=1714.
This patch addresses an issue that prevented users from being able to unpack/open ArcGIS 10 Service Pack 1 (SP1) layer packages (*.lpk files) in ArcGIS 9.3.1. This patch is required for ArcGIS 9.3.1 users who want to consume layer packages created in ArcGIS Desktop 10 SP1. Without this patch, if you try to open a layer package that was created with ArcGIS 10.0 SP1, the following message is returned:
“The version of this package is not supported. You must install a newer ArcGIS Filehandler to read this package.”
For more details about the issues addressed with this patch, see the following link: Issues Addressed with this Patch.
Esri apologizes for any inconvenience this may have caused you. If you have any issues installing the patch, please contact Esri Support Services.
- Chris F., User Advocacy Group – Esri Support Services
New functionality and tools with Bing Maps (formerly Virtual Earth) in ArcGIS 10
Starting at ArcGIS 10, ArcMap has Bing Maps built right in and the configuration of Bing Maps for ArcGIS Server is more straightforward.
For ArcGIS Desktop 10
Bing Maps are now built-in at ArcGIS Desktop 10. To access the Bing Map feature:
- Click on Add Data from the File menu bar and select Add Basemap.
- Click on one of the BingMap features that you want to add and click the Add button.
Below is an image of the result in ArcGIS Desktop:
For ArcGIS Server 10
ArcGIS Server version 10.0 comes with a Bing Maps Application Key. You can access the key using the following steps in Manager:
- Log in to Manager.
- On the left pane, click Services > Settings.
- Find the Bing Maps Key section of the panel and click View Bing Maps Key.
- Enter the user name and password of an account that is an administrator on the Web server where Manager is installed and belongs to the agsadmin operating system group on the server object manager (SOM) machine.
- Copy the Bing Maps key into a program, such as Notepad, so that you can later use it when adding Bing Maps to your applications.
Alternatively you can create a key using the Bing Maps Portal:
- In a Web browser, navigate to http://www.bingmapsportal.com/.
- Create or use a Windows Live ID to log in.
- On the ‘Create and view Bing Maps keys’ page enter an application name and URL to create a key. Currently, the name and URL are not validated.
- Copy the key, which is available on the same page, and use it to set the ‘Token’ property or apply the token in the proxy class constructor and a Bing component in the ArcGIS Silverlight/WPF API. See the topic on Using Bing Imagery, Geocode, and Route services for more information.
- Run your application. It will function without requiring you to generate new tokens and update the Token property on a regular basis. As a result, you can remove any client or server logic to generate and apply Bing Maps tokens.
Please leave any comments in the comment section below this blog post. NOTE: You must be logged in to your Esri Global Account to leave comments.
- Phillip W., Implementation Support Analyst, Esri Support Services
ArcGIS 10.0 SP1 Released
We are pleased to announce that ArcGIS 10.0 Service Pack 1 was released today. We recommend that you install SP1 for all ArcGIS products at your earliest convenience. There are many fixes and improvements that are included as part of this service pack.
Links to the downloads and installation instructions are below:
ArcGIS (Desktop, Engine Server) 10.0 SP1
ArcGIS Military Analyst 10.0 SP1
ArcGIS Military Overlay Editor 10.0 SP1
If you have any questions or run into issues with the installation please contact Esri Technical Support at 1-888-377-4575, option 2, or visit the Support site. Users outside the United States should contact their local distributor for help.
Mike H., Program Manager
User Advocacy Group, Esri Support Services
