Thursday, July 10, 2014

GIS 5103 Module 7: Working with Geometries


The week saw us going further with the use of cursors and nested for loops.  Our exercise and assignment allowed us to explore getting coordinate data from points, lines, polygons and multipart features.  Although I was a little confused on the exact function of cursors when they were first introduced, this module helped me get a better understanding of their syntax and use.
An additional task required by the assignment was to create and write to a text file (see screenshot above).  This was covered in a previous chapter, so I am glad to get experience with editing text files in Python this week.  It is interesting to see how the syntax learned in previous modules is incorporated in new tasks each week.  I have even begun experimenting with Python in my internship, with varying levels of success.

Below is a copy of the pseudocode from my process summary.  Pseudocode is something I have neglected a bit throughout the course, but I can see how useful it would be as scripts increase in complexity.



Start
    import modules
    allow overwrite of previous data
    set workspace

    variable1 = "rivers.shp"
    set search cursor to retrieve variable1's "OID"  and "NAME" fields + full geometry object
    create/open writable text file "rivers_tevans.txt" in S:\GISProgramming\Module7\Data
   
    begin for loop for cursor:
                print "NAME" field
                set index variable/vertex ID
                for loop for point in row with .getPart function
                        add 1 to index variable
                        write to text file row's OID, Vertex ID, X coordinate, Y coordinate, and name
                        print OID, Vertex ID, X coordinate, Y coordinate, and name
  close text
  delete row and cursor

End

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