Organizing of Maps within a Project

[HannahShepherd1]

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.

[roemhildtg]

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.

[KoryKramer]

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

[roemhildtg]

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

[KoryKramer]

Thank you.

[HannahShepherd1]

Yes, this is what I'm talking about!

[KoryKramer]

Thanks for the confirmation.

[danashney]

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?

[HannahShepherd1]

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. 

[HannahShepherd1]

Absolutely!

[DuncanHornby]

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...