Using yield to create an iterator

Not so long ago I blogged about using the foreach statement with an ICursor. I achieved this by inheriting from IEnumerator and IEnumerable.

But by using the yield statement we can achieve a similar effect with much less code. The generator function looks like this:

public static IEnumerable<IFeature> Iter(IFeatureCursor cursor)
{
    IFeature feat;
    while((feat = cursor.NextFeature()) != null)
    {
        yield return feat;
    }
    yield break;
}

You can use this method like below.

IFeatureClass featureClass; // initialize feature class
IQueryFilter queryFilter = new QueryFilterClass();
queryFilter.WhereClause = ... your where clause here ...
bool recycling = true;
IEnumerable<IFeature> features = Iter(featureClass.Search(queryFilter, recycling));
foreach (IFeature feature in features)
{
    ... your code here ...
}

If you're running .NET 3.0 or more you can create the following extension method in an extension class. This method adds the SearchIter method to the IFeatureClass interface which replaces the Search method.

public static class Extensions
{
    public static IEnumerable<IFeature> SearchIter(this IFeatureClass featureClass, IQueryFilter queryFilter, bool recycling)
    {
        IFeatureCursor cursor = featureClass.Search(queryFilter, recycling);
        IFeature feat;
        while ((feat = cursor.NextFeature()) != null)
        {
            yield return feat;
        }
        yield break;
    }
}

The usage of the extension method is similar to the usage of the Iter method but you can replace

IEnumerable<IFeature> features = Iter(featureClass.Search(queryFilter, recycling));

with this

IEnumerable<IFeature> features = featureClass.SearchIter(queryFilter, recycling);

So this was it. I hope you learned something and feel free to leave a comment.

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Looping over a Workspace

Ever wanted to execute a function on all the tables and/or featureclasses in a workspace then the following code is something for you. What it basically does is first loop over all the featureclasses that are in featuredatasets. Then loop over all the other featureclasses and finally loop over all the tables in the provided workspace.

To achieve this and still be able to retrieve the result of each function execution on the tables and featureclasses I created a generator function. I did this by using the yield statement. In order to avoid duplicate code I also created a nested function for looping over the featureclasses.

def executeiter(gp, workspace, featclassfunction=None, tablefunction=None):
    import os
    
    def loopfcs():
        fcs = gp.listfeatureclasses()
        for fc in iter(fcs.next, None):
            yield featclassfunction(fc)
    
    gp.workspace = workspace
    if featclassfunction is not None:
        for dataset in iter(gp.listdatasets().next, None):
            datasetworkspace = os.path.join(workspace, dataset)
            gp.workspace = datasetworkspace
            for result in loopfcs():
                yield result

        gp.workspace = workspace
        for result in loopfcs():
            yield result
            
    if tablefunction is not None:
        tables = gp.listtables()
        for table in iter(tables.next, None):
            yield tablefunction(table)

If you don't need the result of the function you can call the following function. It takes the same arguments as the executeiter function but its a regular function instead of a generator.

def execute(gp, workspace, featclassfunction=str, tablefunction=str):
    for x in executeiter(workspace, featclassfunction, tablefunction):
        pass

To demonstrate the usage of my code I first initialized a geoprocessing object and a workspace variable. Then I used the executeiter method to make it return the uppercase version of the name of the tables and featureclasses in my workspace. I could also have passed for example the describe or the listfields method of the geoprocessing object or a custom function. When you want to pass a function that doesn't return a result like the deleterows or deletefeatures function its more convenient to call the execute function.

import arcgisscripting, string

gp = arcgisscripting.create()
workspace = r'D:\temp\temp.gdb' # path to your workspace

# print the uppercase names of all the tables and featureclasses
for uppername in executeiter(gp, workspace, string.upper, string.upper):
    print uppername

# delete all rows of all the tables and featureclasses
execute(gp, workspace, gp.deletefeatures, gp.deleterows)

I've come to the end of this post. Did I miss something ? Know a Python idiom I really should start using ? Feel free to comment.

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Editing with ArcObjects

Recently I found myself rewriting a lot of code which started and stopped edit sessions to decorate it with try ... finally blocks to make sure that every started edit session closes even when an error occurs. The code I wrote looked like below.

bool saveEdits = false;
try
{
    StartEditing();
    ... edit a featureclass or table ...
    saveEdits = true;
}
finally
{
    StopEditing(saveEdits);
}

I thought that there had to be a cleaner way to achieve the same functionality. Here comes the using statement to the rescue. To be able to use the using statement with a class it has to implement the IDisposable interface. So I wrote the following wrapper class for starting and stopping edit sessions.

public class EditSession : IDisposable
{
    IWorkspaceEdit _workspaceEdit = null;

    public IWorkspaceEdit WorkspaceEdit
    {
        get { return _workspaceEdit; }
        set { _workspaceEdit = value; }
    }

    public EditSession(IWorkspace workspace, bool withUndoRedo)
    {
        if (workspace != null)
        {
            _workspaceEdit = (IWorkspaceEdit)workspace;
        }
    }

    public static EditSession Start(IWorkspace workspace, bool withUndoRedo)
    {
        EditSession editSession = new EditSession(workspace, withUndoRedo);
        editSession.Start(withUndoRedo);
        return editSession;
    }

    public void Start(bool withUndoRedo)
    {
        if (_workspaceEdit.IsBeingEdited() == false)
        {
            _workspaceEdit.StartEditing(withUndoRedo);
            _workspaceEdit.StartEditOperation();
        }
    }

    public void SaveAndStop()
    {
        Stop(true);
    }

    public void Stop(bool save)
    {
        if (_workspaceEdit.IsBeingEdited() == true)
        {
            _workspaceEdit.StopEditOperation();
            _workspaceEdit.StopEditing(save);
        }
    }

    #region IDisposable Members

    public void Dispose()
    {
        if (_workspaceEdit != null && _workspaceEdit.IsBeingEdited())
        {
            Stop(false);
        }
    }

    #endregion
}

You can use the EditSession class like this.

using (EditSession editSession = EditSession.Start(workspace, false))
{
    ... edit a featureclass or table ...
    editSession.SaveAndStop();
}

If you're using .NET 3.0 or a later version you can use the following class which creates an extension method for the IWorkspace.

public static class Extensions
{
    public static EditSession StartEditing(this IWorkspace workspace, bool withUndoRedo)
    {
        return EditSession.Start(workspace, withUndoRedo);
    }
}

With the extension method you can directly call StartEditing on a workspace.

using (EditSession editSession = workspace.StartEditing(false))
{
    ... edit a featureclass or table ...
    editSession.SaveAndStop();
}

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Inserting Features and Rows

Recently I was inserting features in a feature class but my code was rather slow so I looked around for another method and the following is what I found.

First you need to start an edit session and then you can use the code below. This is just a short body of code to give you an idea on how to use the different objects.

IFeatureCursor insertFeatCursor = outputFeatClass.Insert(true);

foreach (object featureToInsert in featuresToInsert)
{
    IFeatureBuffer outputFeatBuffer = outputFeatClass.CreateFeatureBuffer();
    // set the shape
    outputFeatBuffer.Shape = ...
    // set the different values
    outputFeatBuffer.set_Value(fieldIndex, value);
    // insert the feature buffer
    insertFeatCursor.InsertFeature(outputFeatBuffer);
}
insertFeatCursor.Flush();

If you now save and close your edit session the features are inserted. The code for inserting rows in a table is very similar.

ITable table;
ICursor insertCursor = table.Insert(true);
IRowBuffer rowBuffer = table.CreateRowBuffer();
rowBuffer.set_Value(fieldIndex, value);
insertCursor.InsertRow(rowBuffer);
insertCursor.Flush();

If you have any comments or questions, let me know !!!

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Geoprocessing 1 : Intersect

The intersect operation is one of the many overlay operations. When intersecting layer A with a layer B the result will include all those parts that occur in both A and B. In this post I'm going to compare the results of the ArcGIS Intersect tool with the corresponding operation in 3 other GIS packages. The reason why did this was that I noticed that the output from ArcGIS contains more features then I expected when dealing with overlapping geometries. This is usually not a problem but it becomes one when you have lots of overlapping geometries.

The GIS tools I used to compare the result of ArcGIS with were : uDig, Quantum GIS and gvSIG. All these and some more can be found on Portable GIS. Portable GIS brings open source GIS to your usb.

To test the code I prepared 2 shapefiles. One with a long small polygon and the other one with 3 overlapping rectangles (see image below).

When intersecting with ArcGIS (version 9.2 and 9.3 tested) the output looks like below. As you can see in the attribute table the result contains 9 polygons.

To be able to do the intersect operation with uDig I had to install the Axios Spatial Operations Extension. You can install this extension by clicking Help -> Find and install from the menubar. With Quantum GIS I needed to enable the ftools plugin to enable the geoprocessing functionality. The results of the 3 used open source GIS packages where the same. Only 3 features where created in the output shapefile. For completeness I added the screenshots of the results.

uDig :

Quantum GIS :

gvSIG :

Have any comments or questions ? Let me know !

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