GIS 5103 - Exploring and Manipulating Data

 The fourth module of GIS Programming got a little more intense than previous weeks. This week introduced students to:

  • The describe function
  • Listing data
  • Lists and dictionaries
  • Search, update and insert cursors
  • And validating table and field names
As usual we got to utilize what we learned during the assignment. The following is a flow chart of my process:


If you have seen some of my previous blog posts, you can see that this flow chart is more extensive that previous charts posted. The assignment required students to create a geodatabase, copy shapefiles to the geodatabase using a for loop, create a cursor to find the name, population and feature of all cities labelled county seat, create a dictionary and populate the dictionary. The image below shows my results: 


Overall, this assignment was a challenge. I had a few issues arise initially, including but not limited to not being able to overwrite an existing file geodatabase and syntax errors. The biggest lesson for me from this assignment, however, was the importance of being organized. Utilizing variables assigned values to create a 'cleaner', more organized script can provide a level of clarity that may not be possible without them. 

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