Saturday, March 8, 2008

Tech Update: Early March Progress

Well, things weren't so smooth in general this week. Had a death in the family and my profs at DePaul are trying to kill me with papers, but I still made some improvements to the interface when I found time.

The major improvement occurred behind the scenes. I created an .ini file that stores all global variables (directories, paths, layer names). This should make it easier if I create an install package - or really if I just move it to another machine. It was a pain when I demoed for David last week, having to go into the code to change string variables manually. This file will contain all variables that are machine-specific.

I also hooked up the list boxes. Previously, Community names were coming from a flat .txt file, and the list box that will allow Dan to manually choose TMC programs from a master list were not operational at all. These list boxes read from the attribute data of the associated .shp files now. A few problems appeared this afternoon, which I will address this week. First, it takes a while to read in all values from the .shp files, so I need to create a progress bar when the tool launches. Second, I'm playing with a chunk of code that will order the attribute table prior to reading the values (to alphabetize). Haven't had a lot of luck yet.

I think that's about it this week. Oh - I played with the IMS Server data, and found nice base map/streets layers. (After a review session with ARCGis and projecting coordinate systems. Thanks again, David!)

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