How to Update Imported Symbology Layer Automatically?

Question

My company has several maps of floor plans that have the same imported symbology layer based off of the department of use. If the symbology layer is edited in its mxd., all of the layers with the imported symbology must be individually reimported to show the updated symbology layer. Is there a way so that this can be done automatically, possibly from a python script?

Thanks!

JohnSmith2 · Answer

In my mxd, we grouped the floor plan layers for a building into one group which is given the name of the building. So, we have an mxd with many layers of floors of buldings with the same symbology. Is there a way to easily update the symbology so that all the layers are updated and not just one? Right now we go through each individual layer and import the newly updated symbology layer and it takes several hours to update.

David · Answer

The manual way to do this in ArcMap is to import symbology from another layer.

To automate it, you could create a layer file (.lyr) of the updated symbology and use it as the in_symbology_layer parameter for ApplySymbologyFromLayer_management. If you can't loop through all of the maps and have to run the script for each mxd, it will still be faster than opening each mxd and setting it manually.