When creating a Map Series, you have three options:
- Best Fit Extent (with margins & rounding)
- Proposal: Add a "Minimum Extent" option to this entry; use case(s) below
- Center & Maintain Scale
- Use Scale from Field
I've repeatedly found myself with a use case where Options 1 and 2 both have mutually exclusive problems, and where Option 3 is not available to me in the Feature driving the Series.
For example: I recently needed to generate a Series of various Detention & Retention Ponds throughout a county-wide area. That database contains "Ponds" as small as 14 sq. ft, and as large as 400 acres (that's 17 million square feet, for the curious).
At first glance, you might think the best approach is Best Fit, but that 14 is so small, you end up losing the surroundings entirely. And if you do Center & Maintain, then you lose everything outside the 400 acres.
Essentially, what I needed was a "minimum size" sub-option within the Best Fit. Calculate the Best Fit (with margin); if it's smaller than the minimum, then just use the minimum.
For that specific project, I had to create a dummy field and pre-calculate something to handle that minimum, which (on top of just being messy and unideal) isn't always an option. A current project I'm working on has a nearly identical issue with Parcels, but I don't have the permissions in my organization to be able to mess with the schema and add that dummy field. So now I'm forced to choose between suboptimal results in the Series or with a dead-link local copy of the dataset that'll need to be regularly replaced & recalculated every time.
