This gave me a laugh
Saw this on a google search, it made me laugh, so I thought I would share. Names have been blurred to protect the stupid.

This gave me a laughSaw this on a google search, it made me laugh, so I thought I would share. Names have been blurred to protect the stupid. Using ESRI's ArcGIS Server To Help Get Relief Flights Into HaitiOne of our long time clients, FltPlan.com is in the business of helping private and corporate pilots file flight plans with the FAA.
Filing flight plans, along with navigating customs can be a daunting task. Fltplan.com has really simplified this process by storing aircraft and pilot profiles. Access to this data makes these filing procedures a snap. We have worked with them over the years to help enhance their service with GIS. First with ArcIMS, and for the past 3 years, ArcGIS Server. When the Haitian earthquake occurred and humanitarian efforts began, FltPlan asked themselves, how could they help? With the largest online community of corporate and private pilots on the internet it was a natural step to offer a clearing house to share information about flying in and out of Haiti to assist with the relief efforts. Fltplan.com has a huge database of airports, waypoints and other flight related data. However, to date, none of this Haitian flight related data, had been available on a internet based map. That's where we (ROK) came in. We took the data and did our GIS thing that we do so well, and the result is a Javascript API based, ArcGIS Server application dedicated to displaying information about flying in and out of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. If you are interested, check out what a pilot would see when planning a flight from Ft. Lauderdale to Port-au-Prince Haiti with this ArcGIS Server site Now, the legions of private and corporate pilots can better assist these ongoing relief efforts and get their full planes of supplies and doctor on the ground where they are needed. ArcGIS Server Security::Token Based Authentication w/ JavaScript APISecuring services for ArcGIS Server is not as difficult as one would think. The ArcGIS Server Manager works as a great tool to lock down services, create and manage a security database, and grant permissions for specific services and or folders. Check back later for screen grabs. Step 1: Before you lock down your server, you will need to create a database to manage the security. Note: Once you Enable security, you cannot undo this via the ArcGIS Server manager. Don't get frightened away yet, you will see in the next step that this is not a big deal. D-ATLAS (Diabetes Atlas) - How it worksWhat is the D-ATLAS? ArcGIS Server JavaScript API version 1.5 - Bug with Drawing Toolbar deactivation?After upgrading our ArcGIS Server JavaScript API sites to version 1.5, we have noticed some strange behavior with our Drawing Toolbars. We use a Drawing Toolbar to allow users to draw a line or polygon to select features on the map. The geometry from the drawing toolbar is used as the geometry in the Query for the QueryTask. Soultion: The ESRI Fourm blog referencing this issue can be seen here. Thanks to xiaoming - Prince William County for finding the work around.
Hey You, Dummy, Read The DocsI just wasted a good 2 hours trying to debug an issue with a AGS Flex application I am doing. I could not, for the life of me, figure out how I was able to deactivate a Draw Toolbar without explicitly calling drawToolbar.deactivate. It was driving me crazy. So, I decided to revert back to the Flex 1.2 API and sure enough, it was necessary to explicitly call drawToolbar.deactivate to stop drawing. However, I reason I had to revert back was because I think I may have found a bug with the ArcGISTiledMapServiceLayer tileServers. It was just coincidence that I tried 1.2. Turns out, the big dummy that I am, this is new (and very welcomed) behavior as of 1.3. I should have stopped, and read the docs and could have saved myself some time and frustration. Sorting a FeatureSet by Attribute - JavaScript APIHere is a simple example that shows you how to sort your FeatureSet in the JavaScript API. The javascript array sort function is actually a very powerful tool. You can pass a function to the sort method that will run each time the items in your array are compared. Since the features in a featureset are stored as an array, you can write your own sort function to sort all the features by an attribute.
Combining ArcGIS Server Images - ServersidePrinting aint what it used to be. The days of sending that request off to ArcIMS and getting back a print - ready image are long gone. In fact, I can safely say that one of the few things that ArcIMS does much better than ArcGIS Server is printing. These days, we have multiple services, markup, etc all on different layers being combined (layered), client side to create the illusion of a nice neat merged image. That illusion doesn't translate very well when it comes to printing. There have been a few hackish (in my opinion) attempts working around this by combining these different layers of images serverside. Personally, I it looked like a mess, and it was difficult to configure. I set out a few months back to try and figure out an easy way to combine these images using my serverside language of choice, Coldfusion. I was extremely surprised to find out that I couldn't not do it. I tried about everything in Coldfusion's image processing function library, and I was just stumped. I asked around and I could get anyone that could get this to work either. Until today. The other day, I got an email from Ann, and she was looking for some advice on using REST calls to ArcGIS server from serverside. Then more specifically, she asked about combining images from a cached service and a dynamic service (or really any two services):
I, having tried this already, quickly replied no way. To my surprise, this morning, she sent over the following code (modified slightly for example purposes) that's using the Coldfusion ImagePaste function: <!--- Create the envelope ---> <cfset MaxX = '-81.202'> <cfset MaxY = '29.483'> <cfset MinX = '-81.239'> <cfset MinY = '29.461'> <cfoutput> <!--- make a call for the base map image ---> <cfimage name="baseimg" source="http://server.arcgisonline.com/ArcGIS/rest/services/ESRI_StreetMap_World_2D/MapServer/export?bbox=#MinX#,#MinY#,#MaxX#,#MaxY#&size=400,400&imageSR=&format=jpg&transparent=false&dpi=&f=image"> <!--- make a call for the overlay map image ---> <cfimage name="flagler" source="http://arcgis.roktech.net/ArcGIS/rest/services/Flagler/FlaglerDefault/MapServer/export?bbox=#MinX#,#MinY#,#MaxX#,#MaxY#&size=400,400&imageSR=&format=png8&transparent=true&dpi=&f=image"> </cfoutput> <!--- use the elusive Imagepaste function to combine them ---> <cfset ImagePaste(baseimg,flagler,0,0)> <!-- Send it out to the browser --> <cfimage source="#baseimg#" action="writeToBrowser"> I cant believe that I missed something that easy. Here is the example: Image Merge Demo Thanks Ann!
ArcGIS Beta 9.4Wow, 2 posts in the same day. This is just a quick heads up to fellow ESRI beta testers. Looks like the first cut is out the door. I'm downloading right now. Good for ESRI for making the betas downloadable. I cant tell you many hundreds of cd's and dvd's I have amassed over the years of beta testing ESRI software...MOIMS, ArcIMS 3 Alpha, ArcInfo, oh my. Just about every one of them went in to the trash anyway. SDE/Oracle 8i for Sun - Release Candidate...ah no thanks. Article on Map Cache Hosting in ArcUserThose of you that get ArcUser, make sure to check out the Article 'Tiles On A Cloud'. Its a good rundown of what we have been doing for our clients that need to offload some bandwidth for their cached tile-intensive applications.
I have blogged about this service before, but this article does a good job in putting it in laymans terms. Coldfusion 9 LaunchedWow...Adobe just keeps wowing me with what they are doing with Coldfusion. Coldfusion 9 was released today. Check it out: Coldfusion 9 What a great time to be a Coldfusion developer...especially with the tight Flex integration...this make my ArcGIS Server development a breeze. I tend to do most of my searching via Coldfusion cfcs with front ends in Flex. Using serverside cfc's to construct straight REST calls to ArcGIS Server has also proved to be dead simple and powerful. ArcGIS Sever In The Cloud Gets A Little CloserI just opened up my inbox to an announcement from Amazon. Looks like they are continuing to push their cloud computing services. Now this one can make all the difference for us GIS nerds. Its called Virtual Private Cloud. Giving it a quick read, it looks like you'll me able to add an Amazon Cloud based server to your existing network, via a standard VPN connection. Here are the details from Amazon: * Create a Virtual Private Cloud on AWS's scalable infrastructure, and specify its private IP address range from any block you choose. * Divide your VPC's private IP address range into one or more subnets in a manner convenient for managing applications and services you run in your VPC. * Bridge together your VPC and your IT infrastructure via an encrypted VPN connection. * Add AWS resources, such as Amazon EC2 instances, to your VPC. * Route traffic between your VPC and the Internet over the VPN connection so that it can be examined by your existing security and networking assets before heading to the public Internet. * Extend your existing security and management policies within your IT infrastructure to your VPC as if they were running within your infrastructure. The first thing that came to my mind was spinning up ArcSOC servers to handle additional load if your main box (on your own physical network) gets swamped. Just add a new SOC server (an EC2 instance) to your existing ArcGIS Server. I have no idea if the network latency would be an issue in a distributed environment like this, but I suspect it will be. I'm going to test this out as soon as I can and will report back. You could move your entire ArcGIS server operation up to the cloud, but as we have discussed before, it can be prohibitively expensive to do so. With this new method, you can bring them online only when you really need them. I'm sure James Fee has 'ArcGIS Server Cloud' setup as a Google Alert...so what do you think James? Geoworld - Resource Of The MonthOur recent HivAtlas application (ArcGIS Server Javascript API site) was just highlighted in the latest issue of GeoWorld. Its on page 9 - "Resource Of The Month". I always find it strange when the folks who publish these articles never give you a heads up. Anyway, its nice to be recognized. Lots and lots of work went into that application. And - its one of the many ArcGIS Server sites that are hosted here at ROK...If you would like any information on our ArcGIS Server hosting services, drop us a line Dojo and Coldfusion - A Fix for Using the Dojo TitlePane with CFGridWe are automatically updating a coldfusion grid with results from a database as users type in a search box. This grid is contained in a dojo dijit.TitlePane. The TitlePane is a collapsible window. Recently, we discovered an issue in IE. If the Cfgrid has results, then you collapse and open the dojo TitlePane, the grid will disappear. Here is how we fixed it: Step 1: Set the duration in the TitlePane to 0 Step 2: Attach an event to the toggle function using dojo.connect Step 3: Refresh the coldfusion grid when the title pane is toggled to open Coldfusion 9 and CF Builder (the new IDE) Public Beta LaunchedWow...The opening of the ESRI user conference and the release of the public ColdFusion 9 beta on the same day. Doesn't get much better than that. Someone already submitted it to DIGG, so if you want to digg it up: http://digg.com/programming/Adobe_Labs_Adobe_ColdFusion_9 The coolest feature of Coldfusion 9 has to be the ability to use Coldfusion as services from within other languages...I think especially Flex. It was always been extremely easy to call ColdFusion Components (CFCs) from Flex, but now, wow its even easier to use CF functionality from within Flex (and other languages). Check out this intro to CF 9 by the man himself, Ben Forta: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/coldfusion/articles/coldfusion9_whatsnew.html |