What’s New In ArcGIS 9.2 for CAD: Part 10

Leveraging the Improvements to ArcGIS 9.2

I just returned home from Albuquerque after attending ESRI Electric Gas Users Group conference there. It was a very pleasant time to be in Albuquerque and it just happened to coincide with the international hot air balloon festival. It made me think that even a blog like this can be useful when you think that all those balloons take flight because of a lot of hot air! It was nice to meet with all of you who attended the EGUG conference. This group is heavily involved in both CAD and GIS technologies and their questions and feedback are representative of why I do what I do.

Getting back to the topic of this series... Perhaps the most powerful enhancements to CAD Interoperability are the changes made in all other parts of ArcGIS. There have been many enhancements to map navigation, the geoprocessing framework, and new geoprocessing tools. To get a good overview of all the changes in ArcGIS 9.2 you can visit the ESRI.com for what's New In ArcGIS 9.2.

Here are just a couple of my favorite ArcGIS enhancements:

I can now manipulate the wheel of my wheelie mouse to dynamically zoom in and out in ArcMap, and also re-center and pan during the use of any other tool. This allows me to navigate without specifically going back and forth to the toolbar to select different tools. These navigation tools work while other tools are active.

One of my favorite new geoprocessing tools in ArcGIS 9.2 is the ArcView SPATIAL JOIN tool. It allows you to perform a proximity based join between two feature classes, like CAD Annotation and CAD Polylines for example, all within geoprocessing. In ArcGIS 9.1 and previous versions I have to use the ArcInfo NEAR tool or perform the spatial join using the user interface options of ArcMap. The difference being, now I can include the SPATIAL JOIN as part of a geoprocessing model or script.

Geoprocessing iteration has been added in ArcGIS 9.2 for all tools in the form of a batch processing mode and using iteration properties available inside Model Builder. These iteration tools allow me to perform looping operations within models and/or execute any system or custom tool in a batch mode where the variable inputs for the tools are driven from values entered into a grid control.

Model builder now supports the use of model variables or properties used by reference. Any exposed geoprocessing property in model builder can be used as a variable by reference in any other property. Furthermore those values can be concatenate and used much like scripting variable. To use any property in the model as a variable I simply include the text name of the property’s bubble within percent symbols, like this %My Variable%. I can use that notation to concatenate the value of that bubble in other parameters in the model. Using the Model Builder variable in combination with iteration makes Model Builder an even more powerful applications development platform. More logic and workflow modeling can be done directly in model builder without having to move to a scripting environment like python

Remember all of the documentation for ArcGIS 9.2 is already availble online.

Continue to Part 11