Esri Production Mapping Tag
Symbology Rules
When producing a large number of maps or charts you may want to standardize symbology across all products. Production Mapping offers two tools – views and visual specifications – for storing symbology which will help ensure features are depicted consistently across all your maps.
In a previous blog, A Spatially Enabled Document Management System, I provided a basic overview of Esri Production Mapping’s product library. Now, the next step is to start thinking about the ways in which you could implement product library in your organization. So first, I’d like to focus on the types of editing business rules that can be stored and managed in product library.
“Business rules” is a term we use to refer to the logic you build into Production Mapping to ensure the data and maps produced meet the specifications of your organization or industry. Some of the common types of business rules apply to data validation, symbology, attribute display, and surround elements. The behavior of many tools can be customized in Production Mapping based on how you build your business rules. For example, when editing feature attributes you can validate them against rules you pre-define using Production Mapping. This ensures that only valid data is entered into your GIS. In the following sections we will discuss the types of editing business rules that can be configured with Production Mapping and managed in product library.
When it comes to map production one of the most common challenges is to manage all of your organization’s mapping standards. Esri Production Mapping’s views helps address this challenge. With views you’re able to save your data frame and layer properties to the geodatabase and apply them at any time in ArcMap. This ensures production staff are utilizing the latest and greatest map settings defined by your organization, and promotes standardization and consistency across your map products.
One of the most common problems that can occur when working with vector data is maintaining coincidence.
Maintaining coincidence between adjacent polygon features is important when modeling real word information in a GIS. There are a number of tools in ArcGIS 10 for Desktop that allow users to edit and create features that share boundaries, thus helping to eliminate gaps, slivers, and overlaps.
Previous blog posts have introduced you to data driven pages and product library but referred to them as separate, standalone tools. In this blog I’d like to show you how to use product library to manage your data driven pages. Now you might be asking why I would want to store my data driven pages in product library. Remember, product library helps you enforce and standardize your map production processes by centrally managing all of your production related information such as business rules, documents, workflows, and spatial information. By storing your data driven pages in product library you can take advantage of product library’s capabilities such as search, history tracking, check-in and check-out capabilities, permissions, and so forth.
In the following steps I’ll walk you through a basic workflow for importing and managing a US State map book in product library.
1. In ArcCatalog, create a new file geodatabase.
2. In ArcMap, add the Production Cartography toolbar and click the Product Library window button.
In part 1 of this blog series I wrote about interactive geoprocessing (GP) steps in ArcGIS Workflow Manager. Now, in part 2, we’ll move onto automated GP steps and wrap up the discussion from there.
At the end of part 1, you’ll recall we had pre-populated all of the required parameters for a GP tool.
And I was wondering why, with all of a tool’s arguments pre-populated, do we still need to show a dialog box to the user?
Right. And the answer is that we don’t. If all of the parameters have been correctly pre-populated, there are a number of alternate ways that you can run a GP step without prompting a user for anything. These include:
In my previous blog I introduced you to the different types of custom steps available in ArcGIS Workflow Manager including those that make use of Geoprocessing (GP) tools. Today, we’ll explore using GP steps in a Workflow Manager workflow.
Okay. How do I get started?
Geoprocessing steps use the same tools, models, and scripts that you can access through an ArcGIS toolbox. The easiest way to set up a GP step is with the out-of-the-box JTXDesktopSteps.LaunchGPTool custom step. Refer to the online help for more information about how to create step types.
The notion of “custom steps” in ArcGIS Workflow Manager can be confusing. Many people hear “custom” and think immediately of software development. With Workflow Manager, the reality is that a workflow designer will create and configure many different step types by using the Workflow Manager Administrator application. Even steps available out-of-the box – including special purpose steps called “Custom Step Objects” – will likely be customized in Workflow Manager Administrator to your organizations specific environment.
This blog post will discuss step customization (somewhat), Custom Step Objects (mostly), and how they can help in your workflows. If you remember nothing else, just remember that using custom steps in Workflow Manager doesn’t necessarily equate to writing custom code!
We all know managing spatial data, map products, and documents are critical to the success of any GIS work being performed. When producing many versions of your map documents and outputs, current databases and file systems are not well equipped to simultaneously manage these. And it can be a daunting task to manage changes to these files, including knowing which version is the latest and being able to access historical versions if necessary. Also, conflicts may arise when files are not centrally managed which can compromise a schedule or budget, introduce unnecessary risks, and jeopardize the success of your work. Typically, you would use the geodatabase for spatial data storage and management, SharePoint for document management, and maybe a file server for your map product management. If you’re looking for one tool that could do all of these and more, you are reading the right blog post!
As you know, ArcGIS Data Reviewer and ArcGIS Workflow Manager are available as standard extensions, but they’re also part of Esri Production Mapping. If you are looking to automate your data validation workflows, we just posted a couple of blogs topics describing how to do this. The first blog – Automating Data Validation Workflows – talks about using the custom steps available in Data Reviewer within a Workflow Manager workflow. The second blog – Advanced Data Validation Workflows – takes it a step further and discusses other ways of utilizing the custom steps. It also outlines the additional capabilities that you can leverage while integrating Data Reviewer and Workflow Manager. Be sure to read these posts, they might help you get creative about how you perform data validation.
