Hi Matthew
Thanks for the response, it does clarify this a little bit.
I think my confusion actually lay in whether object properties could be directly accessed without creating a Describe object. For example, accessing the raster bandCount property from the raster object directly without creating a Describe object.
After a little experimentation I find that this is indeed possible - my problem was that in the method I used of listing datasets then looping through the list, the iterable item was actually unicode and needs to be converted into the correct object first, ie:
import arcpy
arcpy.env.workspace = r"C:\Users\uqmnunn\Documents\Borneo\spatial_data\DataInventoryTool_test"
datasets = arcpy.ListDatasets("*", "Raster")
for d in datasets:
print("Raster dataset found: %s" % str(d))
print("Band count:%d" % d.bandCount)
Will return an AttributeError to say that 'unicode' object has no attribute 'bandCount'. However, converting d to a raster object first makes it possible to access raster object properties directly without a Describe object:
d = arcpy.Raster(d)
So thank you for the explanation of Describe, and now I have clarified my other misunderstanding about accessing object properties without Describe!
Cheers
Mal