idea Organizing of Maps within a Project in ArcGIS Pro Ideas

Organizing of Maps within a Project

HannahShepherd1 — Thu, 30 Mar 2017 18:21:23 GMT

Providing a feature in the Project Contents to allow a user to organize their Maps would create more room for ArcPro implementation within a teams workflow structure. This could be a similar platform to Window Explorer where a user as the ability to create folders as well as see the last time a map was modified. Subsequently, a dynamic text referencing the map location within multiple folder would be of great use as well.

Fingers Crossed!

PS - My team's current ArcMap workflow contains multiple .mxd files within tiered folder locations for each development project with a .mxd document path file reference in the layout. Our workflow transition from ArcMap to ArcPro would be almost full strength should the map organization become better in ArcPro.

Re: Organizing of Maps within a Project

roemhildtg — Mon, 10 Jul 2017 16:49:05 GMT

I think this would also be very useful. Organizing maps and layouts in folders would help to simplify complex projects with multiple different types of maps/layouts and allow users to more easily find layout or map they are searching for.

Re: Organizing of Maps within a Project

KoryKramer — Thu, 31 Aug 2017 16:11:47 GMT

Just to clarify, are we talking about the ability to create your own folders in the Catalog Pane > Project > Maps and Layouts folders?

Re: Organizing of Maps within a Project

roemhildtg — Wed, 13 Sep 2017 16:47:46 GMT

My comment was to support adding folders within the "Maps" folder and "Layouts" folder, and I'm fairly certain that is what the original issue was about.

One use case is to imagine I have a zoning ArcGIS Pro project. It contains different types of zoning data. Inside the project, I might have several different types of maps, (zoning, land use, permits). So my project folder structure would be set up like this:

Maps
- Zoning (folder)
  - Zoning.map
  - Zoning Boundaries.map
- Permits (folder)
  - 123 1st st.map
  - 142 2nd ave.map
  - ...
- Land Use (folder)
  - Future Land use
  - Current Land Use
  - ...
Layouts
- Zoning
  - ...
- Permits
  - Site Map Layout.layout
  - Other permit layout.layout
- Land Use
  - Land Use Large Format.layout
  - Land Use Presentation.layout
  - ...
Databases
- Land_Use.gdb
- Zoning.gdb
- Permits.gdb

Re: Organizing of Maps within a Project

KoryKramer — Wed, 13 Sep 2017 17:47:01 GMT

Thank you.

Re: Organizing of Maps within a Project

HannahShepherd1 — Thu, 18 Jan 2018 18:42:09 GMT

Yes, this is what I'm talking about!

Re: Organizing of Maps within a Project

KoryKramer — Thu, 18 Jan 2018 19:34:57 GMT

Thanks for the confirmation.

Re: Organizing of Maps within a Project

danashney — Wed, 28 Feb 2018 16:52:25 GMT

Thumbs up for organization/ management options. I will be starting up a project which will eventually have hundreds of maps. Thats a looong vertical scroll if I cannot organize them in some way! My only option to organize them right now is to break them up into multiple projects which is an artificial and unnecessary distinction to have to make.

Related question - is there an established performance hit once you reach a certain number of maps in your project? Is this at all an issue?

Re: Organizing of Maps within a Project

HannahShepherd1 — Wed, 28 Feb 2018 16:58:42 GMT

I'm unsure of the performance hit after a certain amount of maps. I will say that my group of GISers has leaned on ArcMap until Pro really kicks off a better way to organize maps. Like you, we thought of the multiple projects, but that gets really confusing when dealing project portfolio management.

Re: Organizing of Maps within a Project

HannahShepherd1 — Wed, 28 Feb 2018 17:01:14 GMT

Absolutely!

Re: Organizing of Maps within a Project

DuncanHornby — Wed, 29 May 2019 14:28:53 GMT

Kory Kramer‌ this would be a really useful improvement to ArcPro to be able to create folders in the Layouts folder in the Catalog panel as indicated above.

As a real world case scenario of why I would want to do this is that projects never die, they come back to haunt you...

So I've been asked to create some additional maps from a project some months after it had "finished". It makes perfect sense to create those layouts in the existing project structure, so everything is logically grouped together.

ArcPro now allows us to have many layouts for a single project (just like good old ArcView 3.x) but the current design is that there is no way to group similar themed layouts, they are all child nodes of the Layouts node in the Catalog Panel. This becomes tedious to scroll through and difficult to manage when you have many layouts in a project. To be able to add a folder and group layouts by a theme would be really helpful for project management.

As an example what do I mean by theme? Some of my maps show geology, some of my maps show habitat, some of my maps show census data plotted, all the maps are for a single study area. So to be able to group layouts into folders named geology, habitat or census (or any other name I chose) would be extremely helpful.

This is a scenario I regularly find myself in...

Re: Organizing of Maps within a Project

KoryKramer — Wed, 29 May 2019 14:52:26 GMT

Thank you for the additional details on the use case, Duncan!

Re: Organizing of Maps within a Project

roemhildtg — Thu, 30 May 2019 14:34:19 GMT

I think another potential enhancement would be to simply sort the maps by name. So if we prefixed them with category_MapName, all the category_* maps would appear grouped together. Currently Pro sorts them in its own internal order.

Re: Organizing of Maps within a Project

ThomasColson — Wed, 26 Jun 2019 13:25:49 GMT

Same for Servers and Database containers.

Re: Organizing of Maps within a Project

HannahShepherd1 — Wed, 26 Jun 2019 17:30:02 GMT

Is this a new improvement or were we missing something all together?! This looks good!

Re: Organizing of Maps within a Project

roemhildtg — Fri, 05 Jul 2019 15:34:57 GMT

Its just an idea at the moment afaik. I think Thomas's screenshot was a mockup of what it should be. Vote up to get esri to implement it.

Re: Organizing of Maps within a Project

MarioLandry — Mon, 27 Jan 2020 18:34:59 GMT

Here at Elections Canada we are currently generating more than 27 000 different maps using ArcMap. These maps are distributed over 338 counties. Once we move to ArcGIS PRO, I thought we would be able to exploit the notion of projects and end up with 338 projects into which I would add about 80 maps and their corresponding layouts. But since we are unable to add folders to the Maps and the Layouts, we will not be able to use the project as it is intended.

We are going to end up creating 27 000 projects where each one of those project contains a single map and a single layout.

This is not the way to go as far as I know.

Mario

Re: Organizing of Maps within a Project

TimNilsson — Mon, 31 Aug 2020 08:06:11 GMT

This would become very useful for Layouts and Maps. Hope to see this implemented soon.

Re: Organizing of Maps within a Project

CaseyMcGuire1 — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 17:52:57 GMT

@DuncanHornby I found myself having the exact same problem where I have a lot of maps for one project for the various constraints in the same area, and this project comes back to life every six months or so when I need to update the maps. I agree that it would be really useful to have a better way to organize multiple Layouts.

Re: Organizing of Maps within a Project - Status changed to: Under Consideration

NaicongLi — Fri, 29 Oct 2021 15:21:12 GMT