I don't want this to become a personal blog. But I really want to say that I had a good day today. I solved two problems. One that had been kinda irritating for months, but only recently became important to deal with and the other sent me into a full-on rage last Sunday. I'm talking bloody knuckles, busted chairs, the works.

I'll tell you the rageless story. Here in Minnesota we have our own geographic metadata guidelines.If you're still reading don't ask why. Anyway, we used to use this program that I didn't like to edit metadata. You couldn't resize the windows, and you had to type in little tiny text boxes. I hated it. So I took a little sample, and expanded it, with a lot of guidance from the Metadata gods. It turned out quite well, anyone who uses ArcGIS can check it out here: http://www.lmic.state.mn.us/chouse/arccatalog.html

Anyway, there was an issue that I ignored for way to long. Sometimes duplicate information would show up in the style sheet. Basically, the minnesota guidelines don't allow compound elements, but the Federal guidelines do. If you took a metadata record edited it following federal guidelines, then tried to edit in with the minnesota metadata editor, you would get duplicates. You couldn't get rid of them unless you opened the file in a text editor. Kind of inelegent, but it was rare enough that it wasn't a huge deal. I finally sat down to deal with because we're making some other updates. The details here a quite boring, but long story short it took about 10 minutes once I pinpointed the problem. Ohh that's so satisfying. Long story long... The XPath queries used to select the elements weren't written correctly, while this is my fault, I have reason to believe that the object I was using didn't handle XPath correctly anyway, so there was no reason to write it correctly. Since the time I wrote the thing, ESRI has exposed a new object that deals with XPath correctly. Hey, that wasn't that long. But did it make any sense? To me it did, that's the scary part.

Tomorrow, the rage!!!

11:00:07 PM