Saturday, August 4, 2012

Eight was Great, Module 8, the Cursor

Did you know that the cursor object is not the little line that follows your typing on the screen?

It's the Cursor combo tools that really add some power to the scripting methods of obtaining information from layer files, tables and spatial data.  These little search & find pac mans give you the keys to open, find, replace, add, and mix up your data from one file to another.

However,  if you do not know how it's typed, you could be sunk.  Then again, the cursor object can help you find it to write it correctly in the code.

It has taken me to this point to really get the combinations of our pieces learned up to now to have some of those, "I got it" moments.

Keys to remember when performing programing.
1- How it's typed matters.

2- Where it is, is important.

3- Scripts only read what I write into them.

4- Google can be my friend if I can figure out what to call it to search it.

5- Try things more than one way, with more than one result in mind.

6- As long as there is a copy of the original somewhere you can get to,... then trying new things will most likely not kill it.

In the end, the presentation of Module 8 was great.  The lessons were clearly building on one another with smaller snippets of information.  At the end in a shorter time block, I was able to get a running code. We pulled out a list of fields in a data layer,  added to fields to a second data layer,  used a prefab calculation on data from the first fields, and was a  able to enter the prefab calculations into the new fields in the second data layer.  These worked. 

Prof Terhune provided us the calculation code.   (It calculated the number of bird coveys for bobwhites). For those who are inspecting the projections, we did not intend for the map & data files to match. We were only interested in finding fields, calculating & populating the new fields.  Visualizing the results as the code progressed was a confidence builder.

Ending the semester on a successful note is a smooth sound to carry forward.