Pull attachments into Dekho

Attachments are new in ArcGIS 10 and provide a flexible way to manage additional information that is related to features.
Read the ArcGIS for Desktop help on how to enable attachments for a feature class and how to add attachments.

Attachments are an additional table to the primary GIS table but contains items such as documents, images and spreadsheets that are linked to one record in the feature-class.

So how can you view these attachments back in Dekho?   Read more >>

Getting around Tomcat out-of-memory issues

“Server running out of memory” is one of the common causes for webserver crashing experienced by most of the Web Application Admins, yet it’s really easy for anyone to determine it happens due to java heap space limitation (JVM memory allocation).  This could lead to false conclusions such as application needing more heap space or application should be clustered/load balanced to provide high availability. On the other hand, when the service is running out of memory it could appear as a memory leak within the application and eventually it can end up with development team testing it.

This post covers simple steps to fine-tune your system memory according to your application requirement, prior to deciding on any infrastructure changes that would be considered.

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Building your .Net & Flex Dekho Custom Tools with a build server – Part 2

Using Jenkins Continuous Integration to build your custom Dekho Flex tools. Read more >>

Building your .Net & Flex Dekho Custom Tools with a build server – Part 1

You have a team of developers and consultants working on a big solution or a number of projects.  You probably have a source control like subversion to help manage changes to the code, but there are still issues like;

• What version of SDK/libraries/framework and settings did person X build the software with?
• Did person X actually commit/add the source code to source control before it was released to test?
• Person X is sick or unavailable, I need a new build so I can test the latest changes.  Have to wait?
• Development team is constantly being interrupted, and re-building install programs is just one more interruption
• There are actually automated unit tests for the code, but did they get run before the test release?
• The last change was a few years ago, and no one here knows how to build it?  or no one has a license to install the tool(s) to create it?

If any of the above are true, then it is most likely there is no central point of truth for your software release. Read more >>

High Quality Printing with ArcPy

With some minor tweaks to the existing ArcPy print sample for Dekho, you can point the script at your source data as opposed to the map services that have references to the source data.

This not only improves the quality (as the map services ‘rasterise’ the raw data), but also dramatically speeds up the process.

For a 600DPI print at A1 using the standard ArcPy print sample for Dekho (via map services) = 1 minute

  Read more >>

Diagnostics – Changing server logging level from Dekho Admin

In my previous post on Diagnostics, I mentioned how we can view the server logs from within Dekho Admin. At version 3.2.2 of Dekho we added another feature in the same area by which you can change server logging level from within Dekho Admin. It makes life easier because now you don’t have to go into the server directory, modify the logging.propeties file and restart tomcat service. It is more handy especially when the Dekho is on a different machine than you are accessing it from. Here is a brief note on how we do this: Read more >>

Integrating Dekho and SQL Server Reporting Services (Part 5)

This is the fifth part of blog series on integrating Dekho with SQL Server Reporting Services. In case you missed the first four parts you can access them from here;

http://www.dekho.com.au/integrating-dekho-and-sql-server-reporting-services-part-1
http://www.dekho.com.au/integrating-dekho-and-sql-server-reporting-services-part-2
http://www.dekho.com.au/integrating-dekho-and-sql-server-reporting-services-part-3
http://www.dekho.com.au/integrating-dekho-and-sql-server-reporting-services-part-4

In the previous part of this series we now used a second Dekho servlet to display information from a feature info query from selection in the users Dekho session. Let’s have a look at the data flows from the last part.

At this stage we have only used Dekho to retrieve data and while this is useful we haven’t moved beyond what is already displayed on the selection review panel within Dekho. In this part we are going to delve out of the Dekho comfort zone and start querying the database directly via SQL. Read more >>

Integrating Dekho and SQL Server Reporting Services (Part 4)

This is the fourth part of blog series on integrating Dekho with SQL Server Reporting Services. In case you missed the first three parts you can access them from here;

http://www.dekho.com.au/integrating-dekho-and-sql-server-reporting-services-part-1
http://www.dekho.com.au/integrating-dekho-and-sql-server-reporting-services-part-2
http://www.dekho.com.au/integrating-dekho-and-sql-server-reporting-services-part-3

In the previous part of this series we now used a Dekho servlet to display the feature selection from the users Dekho session. While this is useful we still have no usable data in the report.

Take a look at the diagram I presented last time;

What you will notice is that there is still no interaction with the (geo)database – the dataset we used to show the selection is being populated by Dekho. In this post we will start pulling information out of the (geo)database to make the report meaningful. Read more >>

Integrating Dekho and SQL Server Reporting Services (Part 3)

This is the third part of blog series on integrating Dekho with SQL Server Reporting Services. In case you missed the first two parts you can access them from here;

http://www.dekho.com.au/integrating-dekho-and-sql-server-reporting-services-part-1/
http://www.dekho.com.au/integrating-dekho-and-sql-server-reporting-services-part-2/

So far, in this series, we have created a basic SQL Server Reporting Services report and integrated it with Dekho. At this point the only piece of information we have displayed on the report is the Dekho session id which is passed by Dekho to the report as a parameter. In this post we will look at using the Dekho session id to further enhance our report.

Having the Dekho session id is the key to working with SSRS reports but it’s actually no good unless we can access the actual session information to discover what is happening inside the users Dekho session. Luckily Dekho provides a number of “servlets” which allow us to talk to Dekho from SSRS.

The first servlet we will look at is the SqlServerSelectionServlet – let’s refer to it as the “Selection Servlet”. The selection servlet takes, as an input, the Dekho session id (which we already have) and returns the list of selected features for the Dekho session. Read more >>

Integrating Dekho and SQL Server Reporting Services (Part 1)

Kia Ora! Thats how we say “hello” over here in New Zealand. My name is Trevor Hart and Ive been invited to share some of my thoughts on the official Dekho Blog. Before we start, here is a quick introduction about myself; I work for the Esri distributor, Eagle Technology Ltd, over here in New Zealand. My role at Eagle is as a Senior GIS Consultant and although my niche area is the Geodatabase & ArcGIS Server I spend a fair bit of time implementing Dekho at various client sites. I have my own blog (http://gdbgeek.wordpress.com/) if you are interested in my thoughts on Dekho, ArcGIS Server and the Geodatabase but today I will be sharing a recent post about integrating SQL Server Reporting Services with Dekho.

Here in New Zealand we have several mature Dekho sites and recently many of them have started investigating the use of SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) integration with Dekho. Although the Dekho documentation on this subject has improved vastly I thought I would share some of my experiences of integrating SSRS with the Dekho community. If you’ve never used SSRS before then hopefully this will explain the way it works and integrates with Dekho. I will go through the various learning’s in a series of blog posts. So here goes… Read more >>

Realtime monitoring of Tomcat CPU and memory usage

Ever looked at the Windows task manager to see what CPU and memory usage the Tomcat process is using, but wanted to know more?  The following describes how to configure Java monitoring and a free tool to monitor the web server resource usage, and also be able to identify which Dekho HTTP connection that may be consuming it.

Read more >>