Squashing AI Only Tools
When I first cut my teeth in GIS I was introduced at the ArcView GIS 3.x days but after some time learned about Arc/Info Workstation. Ever since then I’ve been conscious of the differences in functionality between the products and even more so since everything was blended together in ArcGIS Desktop.
Although most of us in the company usually use AI (Professional for those early adopters of 10.1) for our normal work, our development mantra has been to assume nothing and code for AV wherever possible. Of course this is not so much of a hard/fast rule as it is just guidance and practice so sometimes we forget that most people do not have AI (Professional) and oops!, in slips an AI only tool. Of course there are some other tools that just act differently when not using AI, for example, union and intersect only allow for two inputs. We lump these into the same category as AI only since we really want the same behavior in our code.
Something we have chatted about internally for some time now has been writing some reasonably hand drawn facsimiles of the the AI only tools and including them inside of pygp. Not necessarily exposing new toolboxes or tool interfaces just so that when an AI only tool is called from within our code base that the license level is checked and if AI is not available then use the alternative code.
Easy enough to identify the tools that need to be addressed – this is published – and even easier to identify those that should be addressed first (i.e. the ones we bump up against the most often).
Today seemed like as good a day as any to start cracking on this idea. Churned out three tools from the Analysis toolbox and have stubbed out the code for five more from the Data Management toolbox. Should make for a very sidebar project to start the year off right.
