RivEX Manual

The RivEX tool bar

•When you install RivEX a new tool bar will be visible with two buttons; the first starts RivEX the second opens the manual.

•If the tool bar is not visible then go to the menu option Customize> Tool bars > RivEX and enable it.

•If no layers are in the map then the button disables itself until layers are added.  The button will only enable itself if there is at least one polyline layer in the map. 

•The tool bar help button () is always available. 

The Main form

•All controls on the main form will show tool tips when you leave your cursor over them. 

•There are 4 main areas to the form:

1.The progress window - This displays information about what RivEX is doing. Any red text that appears should not be ignored!

2.The tools panel - These are the tools available for you to use. Enables when layer and workspace are set.

3.The workspace panel - You select the workspace (folder) your dataset is in and you can view the RivEX settings file for the workspace.

4.Layer to process panel - Here you set your river network and ID fields.

•Click here for more information about drop-down options, especially what ***?*** mean.

•When you select the river layer, RivEX will force the build of a spatial index, this can dramatically improve spatial queries and display. If your data is already in a GeoDatabase, RivEX will skip this step.

•RivEX will also check to see if map coordinates are the same as network coordinates, if they are found to be different then RivEX will warn you, you should abort and rectify the situation.

•Once the layer, fields and workspace have been set you must press on the Build button. If this is the first time the network has been processed by RivEX or RivEX discovers the modification dates have changed since the last build then RivEX extracts out the topological information it needs to process the network. The build process can take some time with very large networks. Unlike the previous version of RivEX the topological information is stored in the TopoCache folder and can be retrieved if the network has not been modified thus dramatically reducing build time.

•After the build process RivEX will offer to load into the current map any output you have previously created with RivEX for the river network.

Copying progress log to clipboard

•At the end of processing and before you close the main dialog you can copy the processing log to the clipboard by clicking on the copy button (), this is useful when an error occurs and you need to exit RivEX.

Pausing map display during processing

•If you tick this check box on then RivEX will pause the map display during processing.  It's as if you had clicked on the pause drawing button yourself. RivEX will re-enable the map display when processing has finished. Stopping ArcMap from refreshing the map window can improve processing time.

Progress messaging colour codes

•As RivEX reports it's status and currently processing task it will use various colours to emphasize a message, these are:

oA red message - An error has occurred causing RivEX to abort processing. If RivEX was been able to trap the error it will provide an indication on what went wrong.

oA black message - General message indicating what RivEX is doing.

oA green message - RivEX has succeeded in its current task. Processing is often broken down into multiple tasks, all must succeed for a successful outcome.

oA black italic message - A message emphasizing something important which could influence the current task.

oA blue message - These are time stamp messages and allow you to see how long a tasks took.