Not in Current Product Plan
Score4110
Would like to see the ability to save .mxd's and .lyr files into a geodatabase (sde/pgdb/fgdb), flat file structures seems so out of place in this cloud world in which we will be living.
Would like to see the ability to save .mxd's and .lyr files into a geodatabase (sde/pgdb/fgdb), flat file structures seems so out of place in this cloud world in which we will be living.
Here is the help on it:
http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/index.html#//004400000111000000.htm
And it should bring the layer into ArcMap with that user's SDE login credentials.
Perhaps this would work if treating a 'Workspace' as a package where datasources can be located and MXD and LYR files can reside in a structured filing system with updated indexing and mapping?
A package would be nice for portability.
Product Library (mxd)
http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/index.html#/A_quick_tour_of_the_product_library/004p000000w5000000/
Product Library Views (.lyr files)
http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/index.html#/Views/004p0000013z000000/
In 9.3 and 10 you can save MXD's straight into the File GeoDatabase by going to Save As...
Interestingly in 9.3 you can see the MXD file as an MXD file in Windows File Explorer but in version 10 it gives it a cryptic name that only means something from with the GIS system.
We have no interest in creating Packages; we don't want to export data. We want users to use data in the SDE. So what we want, I guess, is similar to a Representation, but has more ability, namely to store joins to tables and not force the user to use any particular graphic design.
One advantage I see, is not having to maintain drive letter mappings. With sde, I don't need to worry about staff in differernt departments mapping to the data via a consistent drive letter mapping (which is not the case across departmnents)... but we do need to maintain at least one drive letter, to allow for storage and access of the .lyr files on disk.. It would be very nice to allow access to layer "files" via the server conection string...