Hello Lev,
I'm with the Esri Python map automation team. I really appreciate your feedback. There is no question that we need more capabilities in Pro to reach ArcMap equivalency. You bring up two very good examples: UpdateLayer and UpdateTime. Please understand that we are aware of most of the missing pieces and have our best intentions of getting them into the core arcpy.mp module.
We do NOT have a replacement for UpdateLayer in 2.0 (or even the upcoming 2.1 release). UpdateLayer was mostly used at transferring symbology from a layer file to another layer. It worked really well for transferring that symbology from a similar layer file to another similar layer but it broke down quickly if data ranges, feature types, etc were different. So rather than focusing our time on UpdateLayer - we spend a lot of time exposing Symbology in the Pro arcpy.mp API (which we got overwhelming requests for) . Now you can explicitly change renderers (5 supported in 2.0 and more to come in future releases), and even get down to the individual items/classes and change symbol properties. So in a way, the new symbology API provides an alternative approach to UpdateLayer. That is NOT to say it is a replacement or we won't eventually provide an UpdateLayer equivalent, it is just not on our near-term lists. We want to make improvements to it because, like I said, it was good with symbology but lacked other common capabilities like updating ONLY specific properties of a layer. For example, a common request we get is to update ONLY field aliases. We would love to hear more feedback on this.
UpdateTime is something we have prioritized for 2.2. We know time is crucial to map automation scenarios and we hoped to get it in sooner but time ran out (bad pun intended).
For 2.1 we be exposing:
- MapSeries (DataDrivenPages) capabilities
- WebMapPrinting capabilities
- ConvertWebMapToArcGISProject
- MapView class
- ConvertLayoutFileToLayout
- And other mics members like ActiveMap, etc.
Thanks again for your feedback!
Jeff Barrette