How Can CAD Teams Directly Collaborate With GIS Teams

Question

Hey Everyone!

Have you ever received a DWG file?  Have you ever had trouble trying to figure out which lines you need to copy into your parcel fabric?  Have you ever thought it would be easier if the CAD users could directly create lines in the Parcel Fabric through their CAD Software?   Well, I'd like to share this blog with you!

Using the capabilities of a free download, ArcGIS For AutoCAD you can directly consume layers from a Parcel Fabric Feature service in you CAD software, change to a new version directly in CAD, perform your edits, sync those edits and then the user in ArcGIS Pro can change to that version and see all the new lines that were created in CAD.  Then utilizing all the Parcel tools in Pro they can complete the record driven workflow and build the the full parcel geometries.

You can find all this information and more on this blog authored by Michael Davidson, Dan Wade and myself here:  Connect GIS and CAD teams on parcel fabric workflows using ArcGIS for AutoCAD

I hope you all find this useful!

ThomasHoman · Answer

Thanks very much for the more detailed discussion.

JasonCamerano · Answer

Hello @ThomasHoman

I contacted Michael Davidson the other blog author and here was his response:

"ArcGIS for AutoCAD supports projection on the fly. You can assign the desired coordinate system to a drawing, and then feature services you read in will be projected on the fly (at the server, not in CAD) when added to the drawing. When you synchronize changes to parcel fabric layers back up to ArcGIS Enterprise, then projection on the fly will again be performed so that the changes made in CAD are re-projected (again, done by server, not in CAD) to the coordinate system assigned to the feature service layer. Here's a StoryMap that includes an annotated how-to video for setting the coordinate system in the CAD drawing (see "Getting Ready for Feature Layer Editing"): https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/c5398e8de699462f80c942c727210cfc"

Dan Wade the other blog author took a look as well, and pointed out important caveats here: "1. The coordinate systems the customer refers to for desired use in CAD appear to be custom coordinate systems. That is okay as long as the custom coordinate system (including scale factor) are packaged up in a .prj. ArcGIS for AutoCAD can read in .prj files and assign the full WKT to the drawing. 2. However, they would also need to know and specify a datum transformation that goes between the coordinate system assigned to the layer on the feature service and the coordinate system assigned in the CAD drawing. This latter part may not be workable. ArcGIS for AutoCAD supports specificying datum transformations (https://doc.arcgis.com/en/arcgis-for-autocad/latest/commands-api/esri-coordsys-datumtransformations-set.htm), but would require WKIDs for the transformation steps."

As for your last question, I'm not certain on any training module in the works for this capability at the moment.

ThomasHoman · Answer

This sound like great news.

One question that comes to mind revolves around the coordinate projections - PF is stored in one projection. Can the edits in AutoCAD be a different projection? We have over a mile of vertical relief in our County for private property so have developed a number of Low Distortion projections to account for the grid/ground difference through various elevation bands to minimize length distortions .

A second question - will there be a training module for this workflow be developed?

Regards,

Tom Homan

Gila County AZ