Book Image

Programming ArcGIS with Python Cookbook, Second Edition

By : Donald Eric Pimpler, Eric Pimpler
Book Image

Programming ArcGIS with Python Cookbook, Second Edition

By: Donald Eric Pimpler, Eric Pimpler

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Programming ArcGIS with Python Cookbook Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Improving cursor performance with geometry tokens


Geometry tokens were introduced in ArcGIS 10.1 as a performance improvement for cursors. Rather than returning the entire geometry of a feature inside the cursor, only a portion of the geometry is returned. Returning the entire geometry of a feature can result in decreased cursor performance due to the amount of data that has to be returned. It's significantly faster to return only the specific portion of the geometry that is needed.

Getting ready

A token is provided as one of the fields in the field list passed into the constructor for a cursor and is in the SHAPE@<Part of Feature to be Returned> format. The only exception to this format is the OID@ token, which returns the object ID of the feature. The following code example retrieves only the X and Y coordinates of a feature:

with arcpy.da.SearchCursor(fc, ("SHAPE@XY","Facility","Name")) as cursor:

The following table lists the available geometry tokens. Not all cursors support the...