Hi Jeff - I stumbled across this forum post while researching a workaround to your 'line in the sand'. I need to generate approx 30,000 point feature classes and then render each one with a unique combination of CMYK values. Due to the size of this project, automation is the only solution however, the symbology properties exposed through the arcpy.mapping module are SO limited...the solution offered is to hit against a .lyr file that has been pre-generate with the exact CMYK combo I need. If I have to go through the trouble of generating all the .lyr files, i might as well just symbolize each point layer by hand. Ideally, exposing the RGB, HSV, or CMYK values would be EXTREMELY valuable in this instance as I'm sure in so many others. I don' have time to go the ArcObjects route...what do you suggest?
Thank you.
All,
Hopefully this is of help to some of the folk above, or those who arrive at this thread via google or the ESRI search.
We have had similar issues to those detailed above. We have a corporate style file, and multiple datasets which we need to generate representations for, whereby we only require the unique symbols pertinent to each layer to be saved in the representation.
Having generated a layer file based on the entire style file (by "matching to symbols in a style") we were frustrated that the "apply symbology from layer" command wasn't dynamic, i.e. it generated lots of redundant symbols that weren't present in each dataset. Especially as the help file implies it is dynamic...
Much experimentation led me to the conclusion that it is dynamic, just not when you have matched to symbols in a style. Changing the layer file to a "Unique Values" list enables the dynamic functionality!
Rather annoyingly, if you match the symbols first, and then switch to a unique values, your layer file will retain the symbology, but once again you won't be able to dynamically match to it.
Therefore, the workaround is to manually create a layer file (hopefully you only need to do this once), from scratch, with all of your symbols and labels as you would like them as a "Unique Values" list (you can speed this lengthy process up by loading your style file into your Style Manager). Save it and then reference that using the "apply symbology from layer" command.
You then have a way of dynamically updating symbology for multiple layers containing different subsets of features.