United States Department of Agriculture
Natural Resources Conservation Service		 Montana Go to Accessibility Information
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Use of ArcMap Standard Toolbar Copy/Paste Buttons Causes Corruption of Toolkit Data

Issue

There have been a handful of offices around the state that have lost their data in the Planned Land Unit (PLU) or Planned Practice layers, resulting in NULL values in the attribute table. And now that Toolkit has been further integrated with ProTracts, these NULL attributes (in the PLU) can cause major problems with contract items that are attached to those NULL fields.

The problem that is causing these NULL attributes has been linked to the Data Frame copy/paste buttons. These are the buttons on the Standard ArcMap Toolbar as shown in Figure 1.

Picture of ArcMap Standard Toolbar.
Figure 1.  Picture of ArcMap Standard Toolbar.

Picture of the Copy Button
This is the Copy Button.

Picture of the Paste Button
This is the Paste Button.

Background

In Toolkit, there is a written code that keeps the Personal Geodatabase (pgdb) data sync'd up with the National Conservation Planning Database (NCPDB). The PLU layer and the Planned Practice layers are the only GIS data that are stored in the pgdb and checked into the NCPDB. This code to keep the layers sync'd up is in the Toolkit Edit Tools.

If you use the data frame copy/paste buttons then you have the potential of getting null values in the attribute tables.

Procedure to Follow

The rule is, IF you are editing the PLU or the Planned Practices, you MUST use the copy/paste buttons on the layer editor toolbars.

Picture of the PLU Editor Toolbar
This is the PLU Editor Toolbar.

Picture of the Practice Polygons Editor Toolbar
This is the Practice Polygons Editor Toolbar.  The Point and Line Practice Editor Toolbars are similar.

To properly copy/paste INTO a planned land unit or Planned Practice layer, make the "copy from" layer active by clicking on it in the Table of Contents, and use the dataframe select tool to select the polygons you want to copy from.

Then, use the copy AND paste buttons on the Planned Land unit or Planned Practice editor toolbar to copy the desired polygons.

If you are in edit mode and you cannot get the copy/paste buttons to activate on the Toolkit editor Toolbars, then contact me so we can fix the problem.

The bottom line is, when you are editing the PLU or Planned Practice layers, ONLY use the edit buttons available to you on those toolbars.

For more information, review the “Use of “out of the Box” ArcMap Tools versus the Toolkit Toolbar Tools” which is located under the Share (S:) drive under Service Center/NRCS/CST_SP4 folder.

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Last Modified: 03/13/2009