Overview

ArcSDE Spatial Views are a useful tool for organizing information from multiple feature classes and geodatabase tables into a single “virtual feature class” or table at the database level. Similar to a database view, they allow administrators to join commonly used information so that the users do not need to perform the same actions repeatedly in a client (in this case, ArcMap).

Spatial Views are created with the “sdetable –o create_view …” command. When creating a Spatial View in this manner, the default join type is INNER JOIN. This fact cannot be altered via the command line syntax. INNER JOIN is the most restrictive join type and only records that match on both sides of the join will be in the resulting view. But once a default INNER JOIN Spatial View has been created, the join type can be changed after the fact either with the ALTER VIEW SQL statement, or through a database administration tool.

This article demonstrates how to create a Spatial View and then change the join type using SQL Server Management Studio. The same principles can be applied to other databases using whatever management tool you have available. More...

Overview

This is the third post in a series where I discuss techniques for interacting with the ArcGIS Server REST API from within a Flex 3 application built with the Google Maps API for Flash. The first and second posts presented and refined an example that demonstrated how to stream features from ArcGIS Server and overlay them on top of Google Maps data. This post demonstrates how to display an ArcGIS Server cached tile layer as a custom map type with the Google Maps API for Flash.

Sample Application Concepts

The sample application works as follows:

• The Google Maps API for Flash is embedded in a Flex 3 application.
• A cached tile layer representing Land Base features for Portland, Oregon is served via an ArcGIS Server Map Service, accessible via ArcGIS Server’s REST API.
• The cached tile layer appears as a custom map type in the Google Maps API for Flash User Interface.
• The cached tile layer is displayed at zoom levels 0 - 19.

Here are a couple of screen shots of the sample application. The first shows the application with the custom “Land Base” map type selected. The second shows the application with the normal map type selected.

Live example is here, and source code is here. More...

Overview

When working with the Find Address Task in the ArcGIS Server WebADF, the default zoom scale that is displayed when the user zooms to a found address might not be what you want. This article discusses how to change it using the ZoomToPointFactor property. More...

Overview

This is the second post in a series where I discuss techniques for interacting with the ArcGIS Server REST API from within a Flex 3 application built with the Google Maps API for Flash. If you haven’t read the first post yet, I encourage you to do so now.

The first post presented a simple example that demonstrated how to stream features from ArcGIS Server and overlay them on top of Google Maps data. In this second post, we will reorganize the code for better reusability and add some geocoding functionality.

I’ll keep this post pretty brief and only cover the major points. Feel free to check out the live example and dive into the source code! More...

Overview

This is the first post in a series where I will discuss techniques for interacting with the ArcGIS Server REST API from within a Flex 3 application built with the Google Maps API for Flash.

With this post, we start with a simple example that demonstrates how to stream features from ArcGIS Server and overlay them on top of Google Maps data. In this case, we will be working with parcel data.

This first example serves to demonstrate the basic concepts as succinctly as possible. In future posts, I will gradually refactor and improve upon the code to create reusable components. More...

Background

I’m using Subversion (via VisualSVN Server) for source control. I recently decided to add daily offsite backup to my setup. This was relatively easy to accomplish with 7-zip, Dropbox, and a batch file.

VisualSVN Server is a free package that makes setting up and managing Subversion on Windows really easy. It includes Subversion, an Apache web server, and a GUI management console.

Dropbox is an easy to use online file storage and synchronization service. It’s free for accounts up to 2GB.

7-zip is a free, open source zip library that can be controlled from the command line. More...

Recently I was working on a WCF Service and wanted to serve it up with extensionless URLs. I downloaded and installed ISAPI Rewrite (Lite version) but struggled to come up with the correct regex expression to get it working.

I found many good blog postings and clues from Scott Gu, Scott Hanselman, and Jeff Atwood, and a thread on Stack Overflow, but none of these answered this specific question. As Scott Hanselman noted, URL rewriting can seem like "freaking voodoo".

So I moseyed on over to the Helicon Tech support forum and More...