How to quickly grab many (over 100) feature classes from geodatabase and import into ArcMap?

AustinActon

Background: we have a shapefile with a County FIPS field and we have a geodatabase of many (over 3000) feature classes and the name of each FC contains the County_FIPS.. this shapefile changes from project to project (sometimes the shapefile contains 2 counties, while other times the shapefile may contain 400 counties)

Problem: many feature classes to find in geodatabase and drag into ArcMap

Question: How do we more quickly and efficiently import these feature classes into ArcMap without having to find and drag in one by one?

County FIPS is a common field in both sets of data. Knowing that, is there a Python script or Model we could create that would join these two sets of data and allow us to bring in multiple feature classes into ArcMap all at once??

Any ideas...

Thanks,

Austin Acton

DarrenWiens2

The main tool I think you're looking for is Make Feature Layer. I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to accomplish, but I think you'll make a list of the feature classes you want to load in ArcMap, in some way, then loop through the list, calling Make Feature Layer each time.

With that said, I also suspect that you want to automate some other analysis. The usual answer to, "how do I load many layers in ArcMap?" is, "don't." Do your analysis in Python, then load the result in ArcMap to view it.

Of course, step one is learn Python, so if you haven't done that, do so, and reply with your script for more specific help.

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