Labling Transportation features when using DDP

[LazarArockiasamy1]

Dear All
I am working as Senior Geographer with Census of India.
I am just trying to automate the Map production for a specific publication which will have maps at District and Sub-District level maps. I indent to read from a single GDB file where all my feature layers are stored with required attributes for a state (32 districts + 215 Sub-districts showing villages / Towns).

My problem is with labeling the transport features for which I am posting this question.

The transport features have to be labeled with its next closest important town or a village name. As per our cartographic map design, we generally label the names at the end of transport feature on the boundary of a district/sub-district. I have enclosed an example.

Please clear my doubt. Whether it is possible to label the transport feature from attribute, if so how the attributes needs to be stored and linked with features.

ArcGIS version: 10.0
[ATTACH=CONFIG]24902[/ATTACH]

Lazar.A
Sr.Geographer
Census of India
Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner India

[JonMorris]

Hi Lazar,

What you are trying to do is possible, but it depends how your features are digitised. You can use the Near GP tool to find the nearest city to each of your road lines, but if your lines are very long, it might not give the results you are expecting. For example, if one road line crosses the entire district polygon, the "nearest" city may be just off the opposite side of the district. You may need to cut your line features so only the end near the boundary is used.

When you have done this though, you can join the road layer to the city layer using the NEAR_FID field that the Near tool has added to the road layer. Then label the roads using the city name from the joined table.

Maplex can place the labels off the end of the road as in your example, but unfortunately you have to choose between labeling off the end of the line or before the start of the line (Offset along line section of the Label Offset dialog). It is not possible to allow both. You can create two label classes though - one for 'before start' and one for 'after end' and manually set up SQL queries to decide which label class is right for each feature.

[LazarArockiasamy1]

Dear Jonmorris

Thanks for replying. Sure I have to re-frame the feature class by using near tool.

With regards

Lazar.A