Previous: Creating services
4:The Painful Bits
X,Y data
Despite ArcGIS patting me on the head and saying Excel files work just fine, Excel's a bit tricky in ArcMap. For one thing, Excel can translate a field from numeric to text by stray insertion of a character you don't see. You can try running the Trim tool. But I found it easier to export to csv. I also found that files saved directly from Excel with a .csv extension could persist the error. I solved this by opening the file in Notepad, and saving another copy from Notepad as .csv. ArcMap also insisted that one text field (COFIPS) was numeric--and thereby stripped the leading zeroes, importing "1" instead of "001." I solved this by inserting a letter into the field and then removing it again in ArcMap.
No relating here
Since Explorer Online does not support relates (surprise!) I had to spatialize the table I wanted to join to the county boundaries. In the end, I instead joined the cities-by-counties table with my Populated Places. Since it wasn't a perfect match, some records were null. But the data was now available for querying.
Geoprocessing not
The main functionality I want to provide--the ability to locate desirable parcels--was nullified by the lack of support for geoprocessing tasks. That will have to be added down the road.
CloudBuilder fails
Yes, it happens to everyone: the hard drive crashes, the laptop gets stolen, the instance gets hacked...and CloudBuilder, as I was just wrapping things up in a bow, failed to initialize. I couldn't even cancel or refresh; it warned me the site could be corrupted. I managed this by starting the instance directly in the AWS console and then securing all my data. And data transfer (even with my m2.xlarge) is excruciatingly slow. The happy result was that I finally did get all my data copied to my own machine and then (trembling) initialized CloudBuilder again. It worked. Let's call it a glitch--or a warning that one day it will be true. How 'bout them backups.
Adding images
I wasn't sure I'd have time to compile images, so I hadn't prepped my table. This meant removing it from the geodatabase to add the fields--easier to do this in the intial design. Note that once you've decided to configure a popup to include images, any record that doesn't have one will produce a little red x marking the void.
4:The Painful Bits
X,Y data
Despite ArcGIS patting me on the head and saying Excel files work just fine, Excel's a bit tricky in ArcMap. For one thing, Excel can translate a field from numeric to text by stray insertion of a character you don't see. You can try running the Trim tool. But I found it easier to export to csv. I also found that files saved directly from Excel with a .csv extension could persist the error. I solved this by opening the file in Notepad, and saving another copy from Notepad as .csv. ArcMap also insisted that one text field (COFIPS) was numeric--and thereby stripped the leading zeroes, importing "1" instead of "001." I solved this by inserting a letter into the field and then removing it again in ArcMap.
No relating here
Since Explorer Online does not support relates (surprise!) I had to spatialize the table I wanted to join to the county boundaries. In the end, I instead joined the cities-by-counties table with my Populated Places. Since it wasn't a perfect match, some records were null. But the data was now available for querying.
Geoprocessing not
The main functionality I want to provide--the ability to locate desirable parcels--was nullified by the lack of support for geoprocessing tasks. That will have to be added down the road.
CloudBuilder fails
Yes, it happens to everyone: the hard drive crashes, the laptop gets stolen, the instance gets hacked...and CloudBuilder, as I was just wrapping things up in a bow, failed to initialize. I couldn't even cancel or refresh; it warned me the site could be corrupted. I managed this by starting the instance directly in the AWS console and then securing all my data. And data transfer (even with my m2.xlarge) is excruciatingly slow. The happy result was that I finally did get all my data copied to my own machine and then (trembling) initialized CloudBuilder again. It worked. Let's call it a glitch--or a warning that one day it will be true. How 'bout them backups.
Adding images
I wasn't sure I'd have time to compile images, so I hadn't prepped my table. This meant removing it from the geodatabase to add the fields--easier to do this in the intial design. Note that once you've decided to configure a popup to include images, any record that doesn't have one will produce a little red x marking the void.