Setting More Than One Workspace

Question

I have a number of tables that contain known values in a field. For example, I have a soil type table with one field in it. That field contains a list of known soil types. I have another table that has a list of known vegetation types. I have various other tables that contain lists of other known types of other data. What I want to do is:

• Read in each table, do a cursor search and add the values to a list via tableList.append

• Now that I have built each list, I want to compare the values from a separate feature class table to the known values in the list I have just created using if row.SOIL_TYPE in SoiltableList:

• In order to do this, I need to reset the workspace I guess, because you cannot set a path parameter for listing data in any of the arcpy Listing methods.

  env.workspace = r"C:\BASE_TABLES.gdb"
  
  SoiltableList = []
  VegtableList = []
  
  for table in arcpy.ListTables():   
     if table == "SOIL_TYPE":
        for row in arcpy.SearchCursor(table)
            SoiltableList.append(row.SOIL_TYPE)
     if table == "VEG_TYPE":
        for row in arcpy.SearchCursor(table)
            VegtableList.append(row.VEG_TYPE)
  
  # more iterations of table
  
  # Reset workspace
  env.workspace = r"C:\TEST_GDB.gdb"
  
  for fc in arcpy.ListFeatureClasses():
     if fc == "SOIL_FEATURECLASS":
        for row in arcpy.SearchCursor(fc):
           if row.SOIL_TYPE in SoiltableList:
              print "YES"
           else:
              print "No"
    # More iterations of if/else logic to compare values from fields from various feature classes to the known values in the list I built.
  

The 2 questions I have are:

1. Do I need to reset the workspace the way I did above? is there a better way of doing this or is what I am doing completely acceptable?
2. Does my code make sense? Am I over complicating what I am trying to do? I though that maybe I would define a function or 2 to simplify the code, but I'm still in the process of figuring out what else I want the code to do.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Mike

Answer 1

There isn't much point in iterating over a list of tables if the number of them is small and you know exactly the names and locations of each one -- instead, just specify their paths in full:

e.g.:

soil_table = r"C:\BASE_TABLES.gdb\SOIL_TYPE"
veg_table = r"C:\BASE_TABLES.gdb\VEG_TYPE"
soil_fc = r"C:\TEST_GDB.gdb\SOIL_FEATURECLASS"

If the workspaces can change but the class names are static, you could join them with os.path.join.

e.g.:

table_workspace = arcpy.GetParameterAsText(0)
fc_workspace = arcpy.GetParameterAsText(1)

soil_table = os.path.join(table_workspace, "SOIL_TYPE")
veg_table = os.path.join(table_workspace, "VEG_TYPE")
soil_fc = os.path.join(fc_workspace, "SOIL_FEATURECLASS")

That way you can avoid messing with the arcpy list methods and the arcpy.env.workspace property.