Hi Neil
No, I am using desktop, just on a local machine.
The basemap that ships with Business Analyst displays a map of the whole world, so I suppose
that is why it uses Web Mercator. But an important, perhaps the most important, feature of
BA is that it intended for use by non-GIS professionals (like myself), and hence people who
don't know all the subtleties of projections etc.
There is some history here. BA 10.0 used to use a special projection named, not surprisingly,
"Business Analyst Projection". This projection was described as dynamic. By that was meant
that the details of the projection changed according to the latitude and longitude of the area
of interest, and the bounding rectangle. (Perhaps some guru from ESRI could comment).
It seems that what you are telling me is this. That Web Mercator is essentially never used
as a projection of small areas, distant from the equator. And that, regardless of the
projection used in the basemap as shipped, that it implied that the user would choose
a different projection, better adapted to his geographic area of interest. Im my case
I suppose that would likely be "NAD_1983_HARN_StatePlane_Oregon_North_FIPS_3601",
and that to use Web Mercator Auxiliary Sphere would give a terribly distorted map.
But why doesn't a product like BA make this more explicit for the business user?
Another thing I have never understood about ArcMap is that, if the frame and the
dataset use coordinated base of different geographic datums, it asks the user
for the appropriate transformation to use. Why?? Surely the software itself
is best equipped to answer that question. How am I, the ignorant business user,
supposed to know what the answer to that question is?
Thx for your continuing help.
Rob Stevens
