Good to be back

Wow. I seriously underestimated how intense student teaching was going to be. It took me a few weeks but I think I finally have things under control in my lesson planning to where I can begin focusing on Cabrini Connection maps every Saturday. In another four weeks, my student teaching internship will be finished and I’ll be able to focus on these maps full time. (I can’t wait!)

Meantime, my mapping program is very close to finished. I have most of the code in place. As always when developing an application, there is a little debugging work to do. If anyone knows how to address any of these issues using VBA - ArcGIS 9.1, it would be incredibly helpful!

Here are some problems I am having:

1. I need a way to determine which neighborhood is focused when the program starts up. In other words I need to determine the center point of the visible map and determine which neighborhood polygon is overlapped with this point. A guy at the ESRI forums gave me some code which should work, but it currently does not. I suspect it has something to do with the way the layer is projected versus the rest of the layers. I’ve been lazy with my projections while trying to build the core mapping application and really need to clean this up. I've recruited David Goldblatt at Loyola for his "second pair of eyes" here.

2. I’m not sure yet how to programmatically isolate the symbols on a layer, and then modify the symbols’ color and size. You’d think this would be straight forward, but there are a bunch of different objects in the ESRI API that look very similar to what I need and I haven’t found a way to access the properties I need at this point. This will be a painful trial and error process in all likelihood.

3. If anyone knows…. how do you center the visible map to an address selected from a select box? I need to research this further.

4. Speaking of that select box above, how do you allow a user to multi-selection a bunch of addresses from a specific layer, and then tell ArcGIS to only show this partial selection of features from a shape file? Again, someone at the ESRI forum has given me code that may or may not work. I'm very open to other ideas.

5. When the user turns layers on or off, the legend resizes automatically, but doesn’t seem to want to align to the same y position in the layout, even though I have the legend object anchored to top/left. This is a minor thing, but I'd like to get it to work.

So there you have it – if I can get those to function correctly, I should be in business.


Oh – also, while I have you:

I was able to update the shapefile for Tutor-Mentor locations today, using current data.

If anyone out there knows where I can go to find updated location data for religious buildings (ie. churches/synagogue/mosque/etc.)… or local business locations, I would be eternally grateful!

More maps to come next week.