Using an arcpy cursor: How to define the actual visited feature as current selection of the layer?

Question

I want to implement a script that runs through each feature of a feature class, zooms to the extent of the feature, sets the scale to 1:5.000 and adjacent takes a picture of the scene. The steps are in general very easy. My idea is to use the following code lines:

import arcpy.mapping
myMXD = arcpy.mapping.MapDocument("CURRENT")
df = arcpy.mapping.ListDataFrames(myMXD)[0]
layer = arcpy.mapping.ListLayers(myMXD, "", df)

# Zoom and Scale
df.zoomToSelectedFeatures()
df.scale = 5000

My Question is: How can I run through the whole list of features so that the script will zoom on each feature, set the scale back to 1:5000 and takes a picture? My first idea was to use the Search Cursor to run through the attribute table, but how can I than declare that the feature that is actually "visited" by the cursour is the selected one?

Thanks for any help and suggestions.

Regards

Answer 1

I would use a two step process:

1. Create a Python list of every unique ID by running a SearchCursor through it (preferably arcpy.da.SearchCursor - are you using 10.1?)

2. Iterate through that list to use the ID to make and use a SQL expression that lets you Select By Attribute (and zoom to) or apply a Definition Query (and zoom to) to each in succession - I suspect the Definition Query method will provide significantly better performance.