List Elements or Datasets of a given Layer

Question

I am sorry of this might sound like a noob question but I cannot find any answer from google.

I used arcpy to do batch processing of Network Analyst - Make Service Area layer of thousand of stores.

Everything went well except now, I am stuck with layer (.lyr) files and I would like to conduct further analysis on the datasets that they contain.

Basically I would have

"SA_Store_001.lyr"  (and so on..)

And when I open this inside ArcMap, it has the usual elements of the Service Area Analysis.

including

"Facilities"
"Route Barriers"
"Polygons"
etc.

Suppose, I would like to SelectAttributes by polygons, can you give me a skeleton code for this? The help files on ArcGIS on has SelectLayerByAttribute -- what I want is the Polygons.

Thank you.

---

Thanks for the answer.

However, this didn't work:

Even the first line doesn't work (because I don't know how to deal with the .lyr file type)

#

inputLayer = 'D:\ARCGIS\FoodSystemsAnalysis\Coverage\Auckland\SMC_SM_Ta9.lyr'

arcpy.MakeFeatureLayer_management(inputLayer, "SMC_Ta9")

#

arcgisscripting.ExecuteError: Failed to execute. Parameters are not valid. ERROR 000840: The value is not a Feature Layer. Failed to execute (MakeFeatureLayer).

#

I think the MakeFeatureLayer_management takes features as input. I really don't know. Please help.

Answer 1

If I understand your question correctly:

You can do spatial queries with SelectLayerByLocation. You'll need to use temporary feature layers, but it's easy enough.

Sample code from PSU Master's Program

Once you have your spatial query, you can fiddle down your selection to just the attributes you're interested in with SelectLayerByAttributes using SUBSET_SELECTION as your selection type.