Data Driven Page - Strip Map Index - Define order when based on multiple lines

[ManuHarchies]

Dear all,

Thank you for trying to help me.
I would like to use the data driven page function to create a mapbook of the railways of a city.
I have created lines following these railways (there are about 44 lines) and ordered them following their ID field.
However, when I create the Strip Map Index, there is no field in the form where I can specify in which sequence he has to take the lines of my input shapefile in order to create the index layer.
I thought that by default he would take the ID field, the FID or the sequence in which these lines are currently ordered in the attribute table, but no. It seems to have absolutely no logical sequence and be completely random.
He just pick a line, makes the strip grid along this line then jumps to another random line and pursue.

It's quite annoying because it means that I have to then to the attribute table of the Strip Grid Index and change the page number myself in order to have the sequence I want in my final map book.

There is surely a way to manage this, but I can't find it.
Could you please help me ?

Manu

[StevenPires]

Having the same problem but haven't found a solution yet either... I agree this would be very helpful to have resolved since all the other added features of the mapseries are lost when you just hand code the page numbers.  Lost features being data driven page numbers, name, etc and the ability to automatically generate page labels.  You're forced to modify the code to make it work and it is rather tedious.

[JeffMoulds]

Thanks for the feedback. The best way to get traction on your enhancements for inclusion in a future release is to log them on ideas.arcgis.com.

In addition to your manual workaround, you could also write a python script that iterates through each of your lines, creates a strip map index feature for each line, then merges all the outputs together into a single DDP index feature class. This workflow would have the advantage of maintaining all the attributes of the index layer - GroupId, SeqId, PrevPage, NextPage, LeftPage, RightPage, TopPage, BottomPage and Angle. You would have to throw some logic into the script that the {starting_page_number} would follow the last page number of the previous line feature.