Geographic Information Systems Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for cartographers, geographers and GIS professionals. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
How can I specify the attribute field to use in the raster calculator of ArcMap 10.2?
In 9.x, I used the dot notation.
i.e. To use the "New_Value" field, I could do the following:
[MyRaster].New_Value + 1 = new raster
This doesn't appear to work in 10.2?
While researching to write an answer to Cause of ArcGIS Raster Calculator Parsing error <type 'exceptions.SyntaxError'>: invalid syntax?, I found Raster Calculator trouble that states dot notation doesn't work in Raster Calculator beginning with 10.0. The forum post suggests using Lookup to create a separate raster from the second field. It also suggests this can be accomplished in the Raster Calculator by using:
Lookup("rastername","fieldname")
If you have a choice, don't use raster fields -- run length encoding means that the less spatially complex your data are, the more efficient your raster storage and processing will be. Grids with many attributes are generally going to be more spatially complex, and the Lookup() tool can be costly too. So unless your data really demand it, I recommend avoiding raster tables / lookups / etc. Store your data in the raster value.
