Annotation class draw order or priority in ArcGIS Pro

[AndrewWallick]

Is it possible to set the draw order or priority for Annotation classes? We have a class of parcel number annotations that are a half circle with a white box underneath (probably not the best but it's what we've got for now), and they cover up other annotations. It doesn't seem to be consistent, but is there a way to prevent this, maybe by forcing them to draw under other annotation classes?

[Robert_LeClair]

Is your Annotation all in one layer in a map view or multiple layers?  One thing that comes to mind if it's in a single layer is make a copy of the annotation layer in the map view, paste it in the map view, and use definition queries for each layer's property so it isolates the anno for the half circle/box from the other annotation.  Then move the half circle/box annotation layer below the other annotation layers in the Contents Pane as the drawing order in ArcGIS Pro is bottom/top in the Contents Pane.  Would that work?

[AndrewWallick]

Thanks for the suggestion and reply, Robert. Our annotation is all together in one feature class, but only sort of. The issue that we have a very large project for our parcel Assessor Map pages which have many different scales - so we have 13 different annotation feature classes, one for each scale level in our various maps. So we could use your suggestion but it would require duplicating all 13 layers, and add additional time and complexity during editing.

Still, it's good to have that option in case we encounter a particularly crowded map!

If there's no other way to do this, I think we'll just try to move off from using that symbol where possible.

[Robert_LeClair]

I understand where you're coming from - 13 different annotation feature classes are a lot!  I dug down a little deeper and found a suggestion that you may want to try.  In the ArcGIS Pro help documenation for Fields, it mentions the Zorder is "unused at this time" BUT it seems users have selected the annotation feature, brought up the Attributes Pane and changed the Zorder value of 0 to 1 or 2 to control ordering.  I'd suggest trying this workflow to see if it controls the order of your annotation.

[AndrewWallick]

That's a really cool use! Unfortunately I just tried and it didn't seem to work for me. I have two annotations that were overlapping (just like the screenshot in my original post), and changed the acreage ZOrder to 1. Then I changed the parcel number ZOrder to 0, applied the change, and when the map updated it was covering up the acreage. I then changed the parcel number ZOrder to 2, applied the change, but it was still covering the acreage.

Maybe there's a different way to do it? Do you have a link to where the other users were discussing this?

[Robert_LeClair]

A little more digging...ArcMap annotation feature classes also have this ZOrder value but it too is not used.  So it seems this workflow will not work sadly.  Second, I looked at the internals and there was a request for an Enhancement Request to do just this but it appears not to have been created for whatever reason.  My suggestion would be to create an ArcGIS Ideas idea on the use of ZOrder to prioritize drawing of annotation features in a feature class.

Not a solution I know but it's what I've found.