I am writing to ask if there is the possibility to use extensions written for ArcView 3.2 in ArcGIS 9.3
With the older version of the gis package, i had an extension that allowed me to link together isolated points, in a large pool of coordinates, with the same attributes into a line.
A typical example of my data is:
- 10 hours of navigation at sea made in 2 days resulting in, say, 1000 stored coordinates (500/day)
- the daily navigation can be defined in different ways depending on the sea state (beaufort and duglas scales), weather condition, visibility and so on; my categories are, say, negative navigation "NN", positive navigation "PN" and off effort "X" (no navigation or transfer from a sector to another)
- within the same day i can have all the three categories of navigation mentioned above, say in the following order: X, NN, PN, X, PN, X, NN, X
- all the info about the navigation are stored in a single *.txt tab delimited file
What I need, after importing and playing with the *.txt file in arcgis9.3, is a tool/extension that allows me to create a line, starting from the single points/coordinates, using those points/coordinates with the same attributes. say that i want to create a line that links those points that have the following characteristics: day, navigation status, beaufort scale, douglas scale, weather condition and visibility. if there is a series of 100 consecutive points with these characteristics they should be part of the same line. as soon as the next points, say, from 101 to 200 have at least one different value of the above attributes, they should be linked among them but not with the previous 100. basically, the final result should be a series of consecutive lines which i can know the attributes and the length.
I could do all these things in ArcView 3.2 using a dedicated extension (i did not write it).
How can i do the same things in ArcGIS Desktop 9.3?
Best Answer
I have created a script for ArcGIS 9.3 that uses a point dataset to create a polyline dataset with the points' attributes. The tool allows a user to select a field name from the points layer to group the line segments, a field name to sort the groups (optional), and the point layer fields to be copied to the line layer. Line segments are created from two points with the same attribute in the group field. The attributes for the line segment are taken from the first point. The points DO NOT have to be sorted by group attribute and order.
The points can be grouped by numeric, string, or date fields and can be sorted by numeric or date fields. Point datasets stored in SDE geodatabases cannot be grouped by a date field, but can be sorted by a date field.