DOI-USGS / gems-tools-pro

GeMS Tools for ArcGIS Pro
Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal
45 stars 15 forks source link

Replaced instances of 3D Analyst with equivalent Spatial Analyst function #96

Closed vlatane-va-energy closed 8 months ago

vlatane-va-energy commented 8 months ago

The 3D Analyst-dependent methods in this tool are also offered in the Spatial Analyst extension. Although both are add-ons to ArcGIS, our assumption is that Spatial Analyst is more commonly used because of its utility for many traditional 2d map geoprocessing processes.

Here's a comparison matrix for the methods in both extensions.

Method 3D Help Page Spatial Help Page
AddSurfaceInformation Add Surface Information (3D Analyst) Add Surface Information (Spatial Analyst)
InterpolateShape Interpolate Shape (3D Analyst) Interpolate Shape (Spatial Analyst)

Help pages for Interpolate Shape in particular look identical! Based on the Spatial Analyst extension's update history, I assume these tools were present only in the 3D analyst extension when the original GeMS_ProjectCrossSectionData.py was written, and were later added to Spatial Analyst.

We did some minor testing and produced identical results between 3D and Spatial versions. We did not test every scenario as the Esri methods seem to be identical.

vlatane-va-energy commented 2 months ago

@ethoms-usgs Circling back to this to let you know the line replacements in this pull request should be arcpy.sa not arcpy.da. Sorry for the typo in here - this is meant to pull from Spatial Analyst, not Data Management. Should only affect a couple of lines (see pull request).