Request: show FID in Feature Information, FID in search criteria.

Earl

I'm using GM to prepare data which is then used by our own commandline tools to generate cultural features as 3D objects in our simulation. Sometimes there are problems with specific features, and all I have to go on is the FID that caused the error. In ArcMap I can quickly track down the offending feature, but so far in GM I have not found a way to display/search/select based on FID. The vector data search tool looks very nicely suited for this. Is there a chance to have the FID added to the Feature Information from the info tool, and also added to the vector search criteria?

global_mapper

Earl,

The vector search tool should be able to search on any attribute associated with any loaded feature. What format of data are you searching that contains a FID attribute that is not showing up?

Thanks,

Mike
Global Mapper Support
support@globalmapper.com

Earl

Sorry, I should have been more clear. We are working with ESRI Shapefiles, and these don't contain FIDs as actual attributes, but as an automatic index which is created when the object is imported into ArcMap. If a feature is deleted, the remaining features get renumbered.

"A shapefile's FID and Shape field and a dBASE table's OID field can't be deleted. The OID field is a virtual column created by ArcGIS software when accessing the table's contents; it guarantees that each record in the table has at least one unique value. Shapefiles and dBASE tables must have at least one attribute field in addition to the FID and Shape fields or the OID field." source

For example, if our software stops on feature #10, this corresponds to ArcMap's FID 10, which makes it easy to locate the problem:

Screenshot: FIDs in ArcMap are outside of the attribute table
Screenshot: Global Mapper's Feature Info doesn't display the FID
Screenshot: Search Vector Data also doesn't allow a search based on this kind of ID

FID 10 corresponds to the 12th row when viewing the dBASE file in Open Office, but I can't easily view the vector data unless I find a unique value like the 52m length and search for that in GM.

Screenshot: viewing dBASE in Open Office

global_mapper

Earl,

I'll have to put some thought into this as it doesn't really fit the attribute model in Global Mapper. I may be able to add something special in Global Mapper to allow searching on a feature index, although I'm not sure that it would be displayed in most cases as I'm not sure that I want to waste extra memory for each feature to store an index, so looking up the index of a particular feature might be a bit slow.

Thanks,

Mike
Global Mapper Support
support@globalmapper.com

Earl

If some way to search by index eventually makes it into a future update that would be great. I suppose it is fairly rare that we run into these odd features that our processor can't handle, in any case.

I understand the point about memory management, one of the things we really appreciate about Global Mapper is the simplicity and speed.