Archive for September, 2008

Virtual Earth "End of Life" Date

September 30th, 2008 by Darin

Users of IMF 5.1.006 with the Geocortex External Map Visualization Tool enabled will have to upgrade to a newer version of the IMF, as the Virtual Earth API used has reached its end of life (as of September 22, 2008).

IMFI can’t find an online version of the end of life notice, as it appears to have been only emailed to subscribers of the Virtual Earth service. There are forum posts, though:

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2942688&SiteID=1

And a blog post:

http://blogs.msdn.com/virtualearth/archive/2008/08/27/virtual-earth-6-0-auto-upgrade-postponed.aspx

Posted in General Discussion | No Comments »

Virtual Earth “End of Life” Date

September 30th, 2008 by Darin

Users of IMF 5.1.006 with the Geocortex External Map Visualization Tool enabled will have to upgrade to a newer version of the IMF, as the Virtual Earth API used has reached its end of life (as of September 22, 2008).

IMFI can’t find an online version of the end of life notice, as it appears to have been only emailed to subscribers of the Virtual Earth service. There are forum posts, though:

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2942688&SiteID=1

And a blog post:

http://blogs.msdn.com/virtualearth/archive/2008/08/27/virtual-earth-6-0-auto-upgrade-postponed.aspx

Posted in General Discussion | No Comments »

Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition – How Cool Is It?

September 24th, 2008 by Kevin Rintoul

It has been a very busy few weeks working on Geocortex Optimizer. One of the nice things about working with a small project team is that individually, you get exposure to a wide range of technologies that you might otherwise not get to use. For example, over the last few weeks, I’ve worked with .Net Remoting, WIX installers, Microsoft SQL Server 3.5 Compact Edition, ASP.NET, and Microsoft AJAX. It’s pretty cool. My skill set is growing and happily, I am no longer an out-of-date, middle-aged software developer.

This week’s big discovery was Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition. For those of you not familiar with it, SQL Server Compact Edition is the “in process” SQL Server engine that targets the desktop application and mobile markets. As far as I can tell, it is a surprisingly complete SQL engine that runs within your application and provides similar performance and capacity to Microsoft SQL Server Express. You can even open its database files using the SQL Server Management Studio. The best part is, it is free for distribution, very easy to install, is really small and uses the same T-SQL that SQL Server uses which provides a straight-forward upgrade path for those users with more advanced needs. There are a few things missing that you may or may not miss including stored procedures and triggers but my guess is that the majority of desktop applications, where the focus is not the database, will not even notice.

Check it out. You’ll be glad you did.

Posted in General Discussion | 1 Comment »

Buenos dias, parlez vous Ingles?

September 22nd, 2008 by Steven Myhill-Jones

Unlike my older sister who is fluent in six or seven languages, learning other languages has never been my thing. French in high school and introductory Spanish in university tarnished my GPA, but I had enough of each to get by overseas. However, on our honeymoon in Costa Rica a couple years ago, my wife and I discovered that my brain had, over the years, somehow blended my already marginal French and Spanish into a truly useless hybrid language.

I depart shortly for the ESRI Latin American User Conference in Santiago, Chile and I hauled out my old Spanish textbooks a few weeks ago to prepare. It appears the hybridization may be permanent. Last night, I finally conceded substantive improvement was extremely unlikely and decided to resort to simply memorizing as many phrases as possible.

I’m grateful I’ll be delivering a presentation alongside Fernando Basurto, COO of our business partner ESIMEX, as he’ll be able to translate my words properly–and in the correct language.

Posted in Events | No Comments »

Sophisticated Search and Query for ArcGIS Server 9.3

September 19th, 2008 by Drew Millen

Back in July, Geocortex Essentials 1.4 was a major release because it provided complete compatibility with ArcGIS Server 9.3 and provided a major performance boost. However it didn’t include many specific new features (and the feature request list just keeps growing). With the upcoming (mid-October) Geocortex Essentials 1.5 release we’re excited to cross off the list a few of the major features we’ve wanted to develop for quite some time. Configurable Search and Query Builder is ones of these.

Not to be confused with the SearchAttributesTask and QueryAttributesTask these features allow administrators to configure searches against both spatial layers and data from external data sources (configured via the Geocortex Essentials Data Linking).

auto-completeSome users might notice the cool but subtle things, like AJAX enabled auto-complete text boxes or drop-down boxes populated with domain values, cascading input fields (where one fields value may be dependent on the selection of another field), masked input fields (for specific data entry requirements), and friendly field validation. Query Builder will be intuitive, and it won’t require users to understand SQL. I think our users, business partners and services team will be hard pressed to find a search tool requirement that can’t be satisfied by simple configuration of the Configurable Search feature.

parcel-mapOn the reporting side we’re including “Feature Maps”, so users can see preview maps of each feature they have searched for, without leaving the search results window.

Since work on Geocortex Essentials 2.0 is happening in parallel, we’ve been able to engineer the 1.5 features so they won’t be a big deal to adapt to work in conjunction with ESRI’s new/emerging developer APIs.

Posted in Geocortex Essentials, Products | No Comments »

The first Geocortex user group

September 15th, 2008 by Darin

Our customers and partners have long asked us to kickstart Geocortex user groups where there were a concentration of users around them. A combination of busyness (building the technology) and platform penetration have hindered this before, but no longer…

We (and more importantly, our users) are pleased to announce the first Geocortex user group – California. The Golden State is home to the largest pool of Geocortex users anywhere, and based on ongoing interest, its time to bring them together.

Our first meeting is scheduled for Thursday October 16, 2008 in Los Angeles, and Los Angeles County has generously offered to host this event. So far, our draft agenda includes introductions, a “Geocortex Technology Update” section (courtesy of me!), user presentations, Q&A and more.

If you’re a customer or partner and think you should be home to user group #2, contact your account manager!

For more information about the California User Group, please contact me. Hope to see you there.

Posted in Business, Clients, Events, General, Geocortex | No Comments »

Group Layers in Cached ArcGIS Server Map Services

September 12th, 2008 by jade

Christian passed along a tip for when creating cached ArcGIS server map services that he picked up at this year’s ESRI International User Conference. When creating a cached map service, create an ArcMap “group layer” containing all the layers for each specific scale level.

By grouping layers by scale, you can quickly turn off and on the groups to define symbology and labels for each without concerning yourself with the other scale levels. You can also tell at a quick glance what information is available at each scale level.

Posted in ArcGIS Server, ESRI | No Comments »

Bending the Rules

September 11th, 2008 by John Fletcher

After working with ArcIMS for 7 years, I’ve learned to accept some limitations. Sometimes though, requirements dictate that we “bend the rules” a bit. One recent challenge was to determine the distinct values for a field in an ArcIMS layer. Since ArcIMS queries have no “distinct” clause, we had to get creative. Here are the two options we came up with:

  1. Query for a bunch of records (say, 50). Get the unique field values from those 50, and query again, this time filtering out records that are NOT the ones we’ve just found. Repeat until you get no new records from ArcIMS or until you have more records than you can handle, whichever comes first.
  2. Formulate a special WHERE expression, in the form OWNER.SCHEMA.TABLE.OBJECTID IN (SELECT MAX(OBJECTID) FROM TABLE GROUP BY UNIQUE_FIELD). A real-life example that can be used on our Geocortex IMF Demonstration Site (try the query builder on the Geocode Streets layer) is: SDE_CHAR_VMB.SDE_CHAR_VMB.CNTY_STREETS_V.OBJECTID IN (SELECT MAX(OBJECTID) FROM CNTY_STREETS_V GROUP BY SUBDIVISIO)

The first option is the only possibility for shapefile-based data sources, and for SDE data sources with non-unique OBJECTIDs. I’m partial to the second one though because it takes only one query, it’s very fast (even for finding the 200 unique values in layers with hundreds of thousands of features), and it showed me that subqueries in WHERE expressions to ArcIMS are possible.

I’m curious to see what other clever things can be done with ArcIMS using sub-queries…

Posted in ArcIMS | 2 Comments »