Repoint and Repath – RnR Rejuvenation
We’ve been super busy with a series of sprints, ports, refactors, migrations, and new product development. All I can say is thanks to all those involved and man, that was fun.
For a number of years we had a couple of products used for working inside of a formal development environment where we could easily repoint/repath data sources in layers, map templates, and map documents from one environment to another. With a improving stability of ArcGIS 10 we decided it was time to see if the newly exposed capabilities (via Python that is) for updating data sources layers and map documents could offer an alternative to "dot not".
The short answer is that we were able to accomplish what we needed to accomplish with respect to product migration. The long answer is that there was a large portion of capability we had to build, improve, fix, work around, or expose for ourselves.
Especially disheartening was the apparent lack of testing on Esri’s part of the new functionality against SDE. Actually if you look at the forums you’ll see a boat load of comments about performance against SDE (lack of caching and making multiple connects).
Despite the issues we bumped up against we now have a very nice tool that is configuration driven (can be read off of an Excel file with specific columns) and handles a large number of migration paths (workspace type change, folder changes, hyperlink base path, from file based to SDE, from SDE to file based, schema to schema, and so forth).
Release v0.3 went out last week and v0.4 (includes the skip file options shown above) will go out this week and also includes another tool for reading a table containing the files to be worked on by the Repoint and Repath engine.
I have written a similiar tool in the past, and ran into the issue of the Spatial Connection Dialog prompting and stalling the program. I did some things with ESRI.ArcGIS.DataSourcesGDB.SdeWorkspaceFactory and the SetParameter, but there is always a misspelled connection that comes up. Did you find this problem, while developing your migration tool.
Is the case you’re describing the case of a misspelled connection (string) value read from a configuration file? Or is this the case where there is an invalid connection in the map document that is effectively misspelled i.e. unreachable workspaces?
If a user doesn’t have the “Save User/Password” checked in there sde connection file (.sde) the spatial connection will prompt as soon as you try a MxdDocument.Open. You didn’t have any Spatial Connection Dialogs issue when you were developing this?
Thanks for elaborating. We test this issue explicitly as part of our test suite — we are able to avoid this issue because of the way in which we open the map document — totally avoids getting hit with the Spatial Connection Dialogs. Feel free to email if you’d like some additional details.
I would be interested in the way you open the mxd’s, and how to avoid this problem that has plagued my existence. I can’t find your email on this blog, where can I drop you a line.
Cheers