Tutorial 1 Basic use of Grid Garage tools
This tutorial will teach you how to find and describe geodata. This produces a single table as an output which makes selecting data for subsequent processing by other Grid Garage tools (and tutorials) much easier.
Step 1: Download and unzip the Grid Garage Toolbox and sample data onto your hard drive into a folder that you have read and write access to.
Step 2: Open the ArcMap project (for ArcGIS 10.4 or 10.1/2) in the sample data folder. You can view the sample data in the map window.
Step 3: Open the ArcToolbox window in ArcMap, then right- click on the ‘ArcToolbox’ entry and select ‘Add Toolbox…’ You will need to navigate to the location of your ‘Grid_Garage’ folder and select the Grid Garage toolbox (highlight and click [Open]).
Step 4: In ArcMap open an ArcCatalog window (see red circle) then right-click on the ‘Home – Sample Data’ folder, select ‘New’ and then ‘File Geodatabase’. Rename the new file geodatabase to ‘Tutorial01’.
Step 5: Select ‘Geoprocessing > Environments..’ from the ArcMap menu.
Step 6: Select the ‘Tutorial01.gdb’ file geodatabase for both the ‘Current Workspace’. Now is a good time to save your ArcMap project.
Step 7: Open the ArcToolbox window and double-click on the ‘Grid Garage >Geodata>Search’ Grid Garage tool.
Step 8: In the ‘Workspaces to Search’ input navigate to the folder ‘StudyArea_Armidale’ in the sample data folder you unzipped.
The ‘Output Workspace’ will default to your ‘AcrGIS Current Workspace’ which you set to be ‘Tutorial01.gdb’ file geodatabase in Step 5.
Unless you click ‘<<Hide Help’ the help panel to the right will provide instructions for each of the tool parameters.
Click OK.
You can view the tool processing progress by selecting ‘Geoprocessing > Results’ from the ArcMap menu, then expanding ‘Current Session’ and ‘Messages’.
When the tool has finished processing you will get a temporary message in the bottom right hand corner. If the message contains a green tick then it completed successfully without any errors.
In your ‘Table of Contents’ window you will see a new Table in the ‘List By Source’ ArcMap display tab where the Results table will be automatically loaded. Right-click on this table and click ‘Open’ to view it.
The Results table will contain a ‘geodata’ field listing all the geodata found in the search folder and its sub-folders.
Run the ‘Geodata>Describe’ tool by double-clicking on it.
In the ‘Table for Geodata’ click the drop-down menu and select the Results Table generated in the previous step.
Scroll to the right end of the Results table to look at the ‘dataset_spatialReference’ field. This field reports on the spatial reference coordinate system of each geodata file. You can also see details of the geodata by looking at the ‘dataset_datasetType’ field and many other types of data attributes.
If you select a subset of files then only these selected files will be processed by any of the Grid Garage tools, if this table is selected for the ‘Table for Geodata’ input table. For example in the example below only shapefiles that have geographic spatial reference of GCS_GDA_1994 have been selected for processing.
