Display Existing Polygon Bearings

[jesseLaRose]

Does anyone know of a way to get the bearings of a parcel to be displayed on the map? or a way to access the bearing info?  I.e.    I'm trying to find the bearing of a property line...

[FrankVignati]

Does anyone know of a way to get the bearings of a parcel to be displayed on the map? or a way to access the bearing info?  I.e.    I'm trying to find the bearing of a property line...

there is a tool on the cogo tool bar called COGO Report that does that

[JesseLaRose1]

This only brings up a distance value and for direction it gives a # i.e 1-35-48   ...  Is there a way to show bearing info i.e.  N 48'30" E  ????   this is the info I'm looking for

[DarrenMcCormick]

Jeff Jennes created a tool with functionality that, when working with polylines, will generate a field that reports the projected azimuth (perhaps also bearing(?)) of each line segment in a polyline dataset. This functionality is accessed through a utility called "Calculate Geometry" that is available through Jeff's "Tools For Graphics and Shapes" (available through ArcScripts here: http://arcscripts.esri.com/details.asp?dbid=15376 ).

To apply this approach you would have to convert your polygons to polylines (use XTools: Feature Conversions => Convert Polygons To Polylines. Next, you would have to split the polylines at each of the vertices to create a separate polyline for each section of polygon boundary (use XTools: Feature Conversions => Split Polylines and use the "Split polylines at all vertices" option).

-Darren

[DanLee]

Does anyone know of a way to get the bearings of a parcel to be displayed on the map? or a way to access the bearing info?  I.e.    I'm trying to find the bearing of a property line...

If you are talking about polylines, you can try the Miminum Bounding Geometry tool with the RECTANGLE_BY_WIDTH option and check the checkbox "Add geometry characteristics as attributes to output". You may not need the output geometry, but the field MBG_Orientation might be what you want? You can join the output with the polyline input through the ORIG_FID field.

You can find the Miminum Bounding Geometry tool in Data Management toolbox - Features toolset.

[JesseLaRose1]

These are polygons not polylines, and appearntly X tools no longer exsits or at least we can't access it on our network.  Is there no simple way to just find the bearing/azimuth?

[JesseLaRose1]

If you are talking about polylines, you can try the Miminum Bounding Geometry tool with the RECTANGLE_BY_WIDTH option and check the checkbox "Add geometry characteristics as attributes to output". You may not need the output geometry, but the field MBG_Orientation might be what you want? You can join the output with the polyline input through the ORIG_FID field.

You can find the Miminum Bounding Geometry tool in Data Management toolbox - Features toolset.

... And where do you find the data managment toolbox?

[DanLee]

Your seem to ask for "Polygon Bearings" in the post title, but you also stated that "I'm trying to find the bearing of a property line...". I was guessing you actually need bearings of polylines, likely straight lines as property lines. If your starting point is parcel polygons, I am not sure if there is any tool specifically made for breaking parcel polygon boundaries into straight lines; but you can have a look of the following tools:
- Feature To Line
- Polygon To Line
Both tools are in ArcToolboxes (System Toolboxes) - Data Management toolbox - Features toolset, requiring ArcInfo license.

The Minimum Bounding Geometry tool is new in ArcGIS 10; you can find it in the same tool location. I mention this tool to you only in case you can't find any other way to get the bearings. But please note: this tool gives you "orientation" not "bearing". The difference: a bearing is based on the direction of a line; an orientation doesn't take into account of a line direction. So some of the orientation values you get from this tool may be 180 degrees opposite from the bearing values. It would take visual inspection to find them and recalculate the values. So this workaround may not be efficient if you have a large dataset to process.

Regards,