Bring back Construct From Parent

[anna_garrett]

The current iteration of the traverse tool in Pro does not support drawing multiple polygons at a time. My organization rarely gets CAD drawings for our plats and I currently enter 99% of our edits by hand. 

Please bring the Construct from Parent functionality back, or at least some way of entering large, irregular, multi-lot subdivisions without having to enter each parcel individually. I've attached a screenshot from my production data that hasn't been migrated to Pro yet with a subdivision that would have taken an exponentially longer time to enter in the Pro parcel fabric environment. 

[jcarlson]

Is there a reason you want all of your lines to be drawn inside of a traverse, as opposed to using other editing tools? I find once I have the exterior boundary and a few of the longer interior, like right-of-ways, done with both closed and open traverses, I can use Divide on those longer interiors, and the two-point line construction tools are great for filling in the rest.

Be sure to try out dynamic and inferred constraints, too. Dynamic is great, as you can simply tab into the constraint fields and enter bearings and distances, which populate your COGO fields, and inferred are nice to keep things consistent with what you've already drawn in certain cases.

And for the sake of topological consistency, sometimes you need two lines to meet at a certain point, but the bearings and distances in the legal don't quite add up. If you keep the active template attributes panel open, you can easily enter the recorded COGO for those situations. Or better, yet, customize the feature templates to let you set the COGO attributes from the Create panel.

https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/latest/help/editing/configure-a-feature-template.htm#GUID-91E52002...

[anna_garrett]

Some background - when I was hired on in 2015 we were still using ArcInfo from the 90s and I had to retrain to use that. We went straight from coverages to the ArcMap parcel fabric after about a year. I've been doing all of my editing for large (100+ lot) subdivisions this way for years now because it works for our purposes. 

I also really like being able to retain the bearings and distances from the plats and surveys - in Pro I essentially have to enter all this twice if I want to keep the information from the plat. Once to sketch the edit and then going over the lines (if they actually generate at all, that's an ongoing problem) to make sure what got generated matches the plat. In ArcMap, what I enter in the traverse grid is exactly what I entered from the plat. I have an open ticket right now for that specific problem in Pro, but I'm not holding out hope for a solution. 

Pro essentially nuked all of my workflows from ArcMap and it's been a waking nightmare trying to keep up with edits in the portions of my data that I've migrated over because I haven't been able to nail down a consistent workflow that produces consistent results. At this point I'm considering just sketching all of my large subdivisions in ArcMap and keeping it that way until a better solution comes along. Splitting/merging tax parcels and other similar small edits are quick and easy because there aren't that many features to keep up with, but larger subdivisions are a different beast.

[jcarlson]

@anna_garrettSo, I never used the ArcMap Fabric, we jumped straight from a topology-enabled dataset to the Pro Fabric. I didn't have to adjust workflows in any significant way as it sounds like many users like yourself have had to.

That said, when I'm drawing up a sub, I don't find myself needing to double-enter COGO values at all. I can draw up a sub w/ a few dozen lots, outlots, and some right-of-ways in just a few hours. How long would a comparable sub take you in your older workflows? I mean, assuming your plat didn't have any crucial errors or idosyncracies, which can be wishful thinking. 😐

Probably there just needs to be some documented workflows, even just a sped-up video of someone drawing a sub from scratch, to show "suggested best practices" or something.

[anna_garrett]

>How long would a comparable sub take you in your older workflows?

One with a couple dozen lots, landscape reserves, and a couple ROWs would take around an hour if I'm uninterrupted and the plat was close to perfect. On average I can get a sub like that done in +/- 2 hours, because I'm also responsible for some address management & assignment in the county and preparing reports for some of the smaller cities that don't have the capability to generate their own. 

>Probably there just needs to be some documented workflows, even just a sped-up video of someone drawing a sub from scratch, to show "suggested best practices" or something.

That is what the ArcMap fabric documentation was like. It was so incredibly beneficial, and I was so disappointed to see that this tradition hadn't been carried to Pro. 

Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of good things about Pro. The split/merge tools are great, the divide tool seems like it works better, the record management is better. There's no job book to bog down everything. I really like that if I have an errant line that has 99.99999999 instead of 100 for the distance I don't have to go through opening the parcel, waiting, editing that one line, save, wait, save again just to make sure, close parcel, save again, etc - I can just edit the line like a simple feature class. I haven't messed with the annotation tools yet because I have other users that are still on ArcMap and there's no backward compatibility but I'm sure they're great too. 

This honestly feels like a project on ESRI's end got nuked and there was no plan for people who were using those tools. I was using the Local Government Information Model too, and that's gone as well.  

[AmirBar-Maor]

@anna_garrett 

Statement:

Entering a subdivision in ArcGIS Pro is faster than ArcMap Parcel Fabric.

Why?

• You are always in 'construction' mode and can toggle on/off 'Show only active record'.
• You are free to use any editing tool (that is likely to be intimidating in the beginning) but yield many efficiencies.
• There are no 'Line-Points' to worry about.
• Parcel Alignment (AKA 'Joining' in ArcMap) is faster.
• As you have stated - fixing COGO errors is easier and faster in the Attribute Pane.
• Better functionality to detect and fix errors
• Many steps eliminated: start & stop editing, join & unjoin, 'construction', radial lines...
• Performance and scalability
• ...

I concur with @jcarlson that you don't need to introduce 'scratch layers' or enter the data in ArcMap and then bring it over to ArcGIS Pro.

Documentation?

We keep improving it from release to release. Since ArcGIS Pro help documentation is getting translated to almost 20 languages it makes no sense to document workflows for PLSS or LGIM. Canadians use CPDM, many others use LADM. You can use LGIM as a guideline and the workflows are similar.

We will publish more videos and blogs on the Parcel Fabric Community to make the transition easier.

Would you like us to get in touch with you directly?

We would like to make sure you and your organization are successful!

[anna_garrett]

> Entering a subdivision in ArcGIS Pro is faster than ArcMap Parcel Fabric.

I have to disagree with that. In ArcMap I can key and finish a decent size multi-lot subdivision in ideal conditions in about an hour, as I outlined above, but in Pro I spend an hour trying to figure out why the parcel seeds aren't working or why Copy To Lines is generating lines that don't correspond to anything I input or any of the surrounding parcels for a two lot subdivision. 

I know there are problems with the ArcMap parcel fabric, I've experienced a ton of them. I haven't experienced the traverse grid generating boundary lines that didn't match what I keyed. Please, try to see this from my perspective for a moment. You have a subdivision with, say 40 lots and the majority of them are irregular. They're all along a curved street, the developer wants to have a mix of lot sizes to offer, that kind of stuff. You sketch the whole subdivision out with a combination of the traverse tool, divide as best you can, etc, then use the Copy To Lines tool, and none of what is "copied" matches your plat. Your organization requires you to show lot dimensions on the map, so now you have to individually edit 40 lots worth of lines to match the plat. How much time did you lose doing the work twice? Until I can get this problem solved, I can't trust Pro with larger jobs. I submitted a ticket for that specific problem with Copy To Lines and I have a meeting with y'all next week about this. 

This is an issue I'm going to have to deal with for some time as developers are really going insane in my county.

>I concur with @jcarlson that you don't need to introduce 'scratch layers' or enter the data in ArcMap and then bring it over to ArcGIS Pro.

That is an interim solution until I can figure something else out. 

>Documentation?

>We keep improving it from release to release. Since ArcGIS Pro help documentation is getting translated to almost 20 languages it makes no sense to document workflows for PLSS or LGIM. Canadians use CPDM, many others use LADM. You can use LGIM as a guideline and the workflows are similar.

The documentation for the ArcMap parcel fabric was key to the success I've had for the past few years. No offense to the support team, but if I can figure out my problems with the documentation I'd rather do that. The Copy To Line documentation page, to tie this back around to the original problem that caused me to post this, did not shed any light on the problem I was having.