Speedy Attribute Editing with a Custom ArcMap Add-In

One of my colleagues, TerraSystems Southwest, is assisting The Nature Conservancy in Tucson with the Sonoran Desert Disturbed Lands Analysis project. As part of their scope of work, they were asked to assess the level and type of land disturbance for over 100,000 1-square mile hexagons covering the Sonoran Desert.

As you might expect, editing the attributes of 100,000+ polygons is not a trivial task, and TerraSystems approached me to help find a way to make their editing task faster. The solution we came up with was a custom ArcMap add-in that would enable them to quickly edit the attributes for a selected polygon and move to the next feature for assessment.

The ArcGIS 10.0 and 10.1 add-in was developed in Visual Studio 2010 using esri ArcObjects, and contains a custom toolbar, tools, buttons, and dockable window forms. The Add-in leverages the ArcGIS add-in framework for simple deployment and updating.

The Add-in quickly edits the attributes of customizable fields to record the following information about each hexagon:

• The disturbance amount (i.e. DistAmnt) of type Double
• The disturbance type (i.e. DistType) of type String at least 2 characters wide. (The editor records an abbreviation of the disturbance type)
• The order (priority) in which you want to edit the polygons (i.e. HexID), of type Integer
• A flag (i.e. DistFlag) indicating that a polygon needs further review, of type Integer (stores a null, 0 or 1)

The Add-in allows users to identify the layer and fields in which to record these attributes, so it is not hard-coded to a particular layer or field name. In addition, the Add-in records the layer and field assignments to an XML file for reloading in future editing sessions, so users only need to configure the Add-in once.

Moreover, it was important to also ensure that the disturbance level and type attributes were not hard-coded, as it may be advantageous to add additional disturbance types in the future. In response, the Add-in was written to load both the disturbance levels and types from XML files that can be easily accessed from within the Add-in to make changes to the attributes the Add-in records for each feature.

The main strength of this Add-in is time savings during editing, users can select a feature and quickly edit multiple attributes using two different editing methods:

• The Add-in dynamically* maps keys on their keyboard to enable power users to press a number key to set the feature’s level of disturbance, followed by a letter key to set the feature’s type of disturbance. Users can also press the space-bar to flag a feature as needing follow-up.
• Alternatively, users can open the dockable Quick Edit window that contains dynamically* added buttons that represent disturbance levels and disturbance types. Users simply click one disturbance level button and another disturbance type button to set the feature’s attributes. Alternatively, users can click a button to flag the feature for follow-up.

* The buttons and keys are dynamically mapped when the Add-in loads. So if users edit the XML files to register new disturbance levels and types, the Add-in will dynamically map a new key and add new buttons to the QuickEdit Window.

Once both the feature’s disturbance level and type have been set (either by pressing custom mapped keys or using the Quick Edit Window), the Add-in will automatically* select the next feature in the edit series (using the field users selected as their Priority field when they configured the Add-in) and automatically* zoom to the next feature for inspection.

* Some times there are editing situations in which users prefer to not have the Add-in automatically select the next feature and/or zoom to the next feature. So both of these functions can be turned on or off in the Add-in’s configuration window.

Finally the Add-in contains help documentation showing users how to install, use and customize the Add-in.

By a conservative estimate, this Add-in shaves approximately 7 seconds off of each editing operation. Multiplied by the 100,000+ hexagons, the Add-in has saved nearly 200 hours on this project and countless hours on future projects that can leverage its customizable framework for future conservation assessment programs.

For more information about the Add-in see our website:

http://www.johndonoghue.net/gis/selected-projects/tnc-land-disturbance-editor-arcmap-custom-add-in/