Can you animate a parcel lineage/ history in ArcPro Parcel fabric?

Kara_Shindle

So one of the original reasons we went to the ArcMap Parcel fabric was keeping track of parcel history.  We are looking at a conversion to ArcPro, and a new request has come up.

 

A genealogist wants an animated history of a parcel for a presentation.  I want to know if this is possible.  I'm imported our original fabric to ArcPro to test out records and I'm struggling to "backfill" the parcels history - seems like I might consider posting an idea for building out a parcels history for ownership/long searches, but I digress.

Is it possible to make a parcel fabric time aware without converting it out of the fabric?  Is there a way to animate it in the fabric or can anyone share if they have done it previously, and how?

 

jcarlson

You can sort of do it, but it requires some data manipulation.

The first issue you'll run into is that your parcel and line features don't actually have their own created/retired date fields. Those come from the associated record. For a feature layer to be time-enabled, the time attribute has to be part of the main table.

If you wanted just a per-map solution in Pro, you can do an ad-hoc join to bring in those attributes based on the associated record, but you'll need to make two joins, one of the created record, one for the retired.

If you're working with an Enterprise Geodatabase, you can also use a Query Layer to do this.

In our org, we actually have simple hosted feature layers that use a GUID field to sync with the "real" parcel fabric. In the hosted, layers, though, we use Python to "bake in" the timestamps from the associated records, so all of our hosted parcel fabric layers are time-enabled.

It can be complicated, and maybe not the right solution for other orgs. For us, though, it allows certain modifications to our public-facing cadastre, like the created/retired timestamps, that would otherwise be difficult to implement directly in the parcel fabric itself.

With those time-enabled hosted layers, we can then create time-enabled web apps, or bring the layer into ArcGIS Pro to create animations, etc.