Re-creating a desktop fabric workflow into a pro fabric workflow

[JamiePetersen]

I need some advice in re-creating a desktop fabric workflow into a pro fabric workflow.

The old way-  At the time of plat of survey review, I would create a plan, create a construction, construct 1-3 parcels (maybe a road row parcel and two tax parcels) from the survey, keep but not join, save, and build and join at a later time when deeds are recorded.

Two things I am struggling with: 

1. What is the best way to pre-draw features like I do now and come back to them?  This seems pretty straightforward, but here goes:  I think the way to do this would be to create the tax parcel lines, but not create the seed and not build.  Come back to those lines later when needed and seed and build.  Any problems doing it that way?  I imagine I can hide those lines not used.
2. How do I use Traverse to create more than one parcel at a time?  See attachment.  I would have done this drawing as a construction in the old fabric, creating the entire outer boundary and then using breakpoints, planarize lines, and connecting the dots.  From what I am experiencing now with Traverse is that I can use it to create one parcel, and then another parcel, and then another parcel, even chained together, but I am not seeing a way to create multiple parcels at one time as I could in the old "new construction".

[anna_garrett · Accepted solution]

so I have a really similar workflow for the period of time the calendar year and our tax year are out of sync and I have to keep future data out of the production data will become our semi-annual tax year release.

I just created new parcel fabric types called "future_tax", "future_lots" etc that fit my needs. I sketch everything there, build the fabric, and when the calendars sync back up I mark the old parcels historic and copy/paste from the "future" layers. This functions similarly to having parcels suspended in construction in the old parcel fabric. except this way you can actually use the align tools if you need to rotate/move the parcels when you sketch it in versus having to wait. 

w/r/t using the new traverse tool to make multiple parcels at the same time: you really can't the way we used to in the old fabric. this new traverse tool is more analogous to the traverse tool in vanilla ArcMap, not the parcel fabric version if you ever used that.

what I have taken to doing is entering the calls for the boundary with all the breaks, then using the construct tool with the calls entered in the attributes pane if it's something simple like a 2 or 3 lot subdivision. big multi-lot subdivisions require a bit more work, and my workflow is generally like this:

1: enter calls for the subdivision boundary in subdivision layer, add seed for subdivision polygon

2: manually copy the subdivision lines to the tax layer or lot layer

3: use the divide tool on the boundary in the tax/lot layer to set up the outer boundaries

4a: enter street centerlines calls and use the copy parallel tool to generate blocks ---or---

4b: enter interior lot line calls using the traverse tool to construct blocks 

5: use create features to create lot lines between interior and exterior boundaries

[JamiePetersen]

Thank you for the long answer.  Using a different parcel type like you will work very good for me.   I hear what you are saying for the construction process.  I will try your steps! 

I am going to leave this without accepting your answer as the solution for now to see if any additional good ideas come in.  That said, your answer was great, and I will mark it.  

[anna_garrett]

for sure, I'd love to see what other people that came from the old parcel fabric are doing as well. 

[jcarlson]

We came from a topology-enabled feature dataset, not the ArcMap fabric, but our construction workflow is pretty similar to @anna_garrett .

One key difference is that we use a hosted feature layer for our "future" stuff. We'll use the WAB Parcel Drafter widget or work with the layer directly in Pro, and because those lines are COGO-enabled, copying and pasting or using Copy Lines To works great in getting those features into the right parcel fabric line layers.

One downside to doing things one parcel / traverse at a time is that your adjustment tools can't apply holistically to the entire set of lines. There are the Consistency Check and LSA tools under the Quality tab of the ribbon, so you could at least draw your individual parcels and then run an analysis to check all your lines against one another to make adjustments to the shapes.

[JamiePetersen]

Interesting @jcarlson!  So I have to ask, if @anna_garrett is using the enterprise variety of the Fabric, would WAB Parcel Drafter allow her to configure the Future_parcel type polys and lines that she's created as inputs?  Do the base fabric feature classes that are published contain all the required fields/types needed for Parcel Drafter? Or does it require specific hosted feature layers to be configured?

[anna_garrett]

hmm. I haven't used the parcel drafter or the enterprise tools in general - I am the only editor for my organization so it would be overkill 🙂

[jcarlson]

We use the Enterprise version of things. Speaking of which, you could always store your future changes as their own versions and wait to reconcile/post, but if you end up editing adjacent features in other versions, you run the risk of creating version conflicts, which gets messy.

In short, no, the Pro Parcel Fabric is not compatible with the Parcel Drafter widget as an input, as it requires additional fields to track what kind of boundary line it is (which the fabric manages in separate layers, not a field), and also where the line falls in the traverse sequence.

I suppose you could try to add fields to the parcel fabric to allow this sort of thing, but I wouldn't advise it, personally. The Parcel Drafter isn't designed to make edits to other features and maintain topological integrity. It's a lot faster to draw up a traverse in the WAB tool, since the features are held in your browser's memory, rather than having to create every single line as a new feature as you go. And it's easy enough to use Copy Lines To or copy/paste and then use Pro's alignment tools to get your sketched features to align with the existing fabric.

I don't do that for every edit, but if it's a particularly long traverse, it does save time, and allows me to do the lengthier part of my workflow in a layer that won't impact the responsiveness of the fabric feature service.