The ArcPad Team Blog

Unofficial stuff from the team behind the World's leading mobile GIS platform

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

‘Quick Route’ Applet

Some of you may have had a sneak preview of this applet at the International Users Conference (in San Diego), but now you can all try it yourselves! Download it now from ArcScripts. This applet requires ArcPad 7.0.1 which has just been released. You can download an evaluation of ArcPad 7.0.1 from here.

This applet allows you to highlight the shortest route which is defined by up to 10 stops. To use, it requires polyline feature layers that have ‘clean’ topology ie: lines segments that snap end to end, and always meet at intersections rather than overlap. The user can switch between different layers within a map, but only produce a route on one layer at a time.

The Quick Route toolbar has 2 dropdowns with 6 buttons. The first has:

Add Stop (2 to 10 stops can be added)

Delete last stop (used to clear stops)

Delete all stops (used to clear all stops)

The second has:

Find Route (highlights the shortest route between stops)

Configuration Options (Allows input of an expression to filter records)

Validate Touching lines (Select 2 “touching” lines and run tool to validate that they meet)


So to generate a quick route,

  • open a polyline feature layer
  • tap the ‘Add Stop’ button
  • tap locations on the map where you wish to add stop (at a minimum add a start and stop location)
  • tap the ‘Find Route’ button!



















If you find that a complete route is not created, that it stops part way, zoom in and use the “Validate Touching Line” tool to confirm if there is a break in your topology. For more information, see the Readme.doc file included in the download.

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Datum Configuration Tool

A new tool introduced in ArcPad 7.0.1 is the Datum Configuration Tool. Users were finding it was a little complex working with the transforms.dbf and the defaulttransforms.dbf file, so this tool was created. The requirements for the tool is that you have Microsoft's .Net 2.0 framework installed. You can download it from here http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=0856eacb-4362-4b0d-8edd-aab15c5e04f5&displaylang=en

The Datum Configuration Tool allows you to:

• Define a new Datum Transformation



• Manage custom transformations you have already defined




• And set Default Transformstions (NAD 27 <-> WGS84, best transform for continental US is NAD_1927_To_WGS_1984_4)



• Download transform files to your device if it is connected

For more information on this tool, browse to your ArcPad install folder and then "help" directory. Open the file ArcPad 7 Datum Configuration Tool.pdf for a full description of the tool.

ArcPad 7.0.1 Released


ArcPad 7.0.1 is now available for download

There are approximately 125 improvements and fixes in ArcPad 7.0.1.

Full details of what's new and improved can be found in the 'readme' included in the download.


Some points of interest are :
  • Faster start up time
  • Faster drawing performance, especially on larger datasets
  • New datum configuration tool
  • Korean and Czech languages added
  • Projection and datum improvements
  • Many quality improvements

ArcPad 7.0.1 is a free update for ArcPad 7 users.

Download it now