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Control default CAD (.dwg) layer creation Pro 2.92

KeithAddison1

Is there any way to control the default behavior when adding .dwg files to ArcGIS Pro? The default behavior when I add the polylines from a .dwg is that Pro will create a separate layer for every layer in the .dwg. All I want is one singular layer that is the entire polylines, which Pro does create (and this was the default behavior in ArcMap) but then it also creates all the other layers as well. In other words I want a many to one relationship between the CAD and GIS layers, not a one to one. Cleaning this all up is time consuming as the CAD drawings I add typically have a large number of layers.

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KeithAddison1

I was wonder why I didn't see it...its gone or totally relocated in 3.1, search is not finding any information.

rzufelt

In 2.9.3 it is in the options menu below BIM (as in screenshot above). Don't have 2.9.2 to check, but noticed it is no longer there in 3.1. 3.1 seems to just add the .dwg layers without converting.

KeithAddison1

That sounds like a good option - where is the 'convert to feature class' option so I can shut it off? I can't seem to find it.

rzufelt

Guess I should have read the original post closer. Thought you were dealing with ALL the entities being converted, not just ALL the line "LAYER"s.

If you tell it not to convert to feature class in options, it doesn't take near as long as it loads the CAD data from .dwg but doesn't convert it to feature class. Then you could r-click and export the layer desired with all the lines to feature class.

Rather than dealing with this, I have a separate Pro project (so that it always uses the same default FGDB) that I open the CAD data in, then, use Feature class to Feature class to convert the polylines. This allows me to use an expression to export only the desired layers to a FGDB feature class.

An added advantage of doing it this way is that I never have to actually load the .dwg into the Pro project and bog it down.

KeithAddison1

I select only the polyline object type and it still makes a GIS layer for each myriad AutoCAD layer containing a polyline:

It does also make a consolidated GIS layer containing all the polylines, but it still makes a layer for each CAD layer containing a polyline as well. 99.99% of the time I just want a singular GIS polyline layer for all the CAD polylines, irrespective of layer. The problem is it takes a long time due to Pro's incessant lag that comes from having more than a few dozen layers in a map, to remove all the unneeded polyline layers, and if I don't remove them there's a terrible lag introduced by all the unneeded layers, which can number in the hundreds.

rzufelt

If you "drill" into the .dwg and only add the polyline layer, it only converts the polylines to GIS and doesn't create all the other layers in the .dwg.

KeithAddison1

Bump for visibility. There has to be a way to keep it from adding a GIS class for every layer. CAD drawings I add have dozens to hundreds of layers, when Pro makes a class out of each and every layer it slows the aprx down to a most wretched crawl. This really should be considered an equivalency issue.

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