What's new in ArcGIS Schematics 10

ArcGIS 10 brings big changes for Schematics. The old core of Schematics has been completely removed and replaced by core ArcGIS functionality.

By making this architectural change, the top user complaints for Schematics have been solved.

The major changes are

• Diagrams are now stored as features.
  • This allows the ArcMap user to apply core symbology and labeling directly to the schematic diagram.
  • No more hard coding in the configuration is required.
  • The server story is simplified. In previous versions, you needed to export a schematic diagram back as features and expose those features to the server.
• Changes have been made to Start/Stop Editing on Schematic diagrams. In the past, two users could both edit a diagram at the same time, but the last one to hit the save button was the winner. Now when a user starts editing, the diagram is locked to other users.
• Better management of diagrams that are related to versioned data has been implemented.
  • End users can now easily change the version that a diagram is referencing.
  • Administrators can bulk update diagrams to point to a different version.
• You can easily see what is new after updating a diagram.
  • A new UpdateStatus field exists so an end user can symbolize on this field to see things that were just added to a diagram because of an update.
• Configuration is made easier.
  • There is a completely new user interface for the configuration tool.
  • Due to diagrams being stored as features, there is no longer a need to configure schematic properties to handle symbology and labeling. This greatly reduces the initial configuration and implementation time.
• There is a new algorithm for Geo-Compression. This is useful in situations where items on the diagram are very far apart in the real world. You want to try to maintain relative position between things (North–South, East–West) but squeeze everything toward the center to bring more clarity and allow plotting on a smaller piece of paper.
• Several rules allow using Attributes now. An example is the Route Node Reduction rule. Previously, if you wanted to only reduce network junctions where the street name on both sides of the junction was the same, you had to code a custom rule. In ArcGIS 10, you just use the By Attribute option, and no coding is required.
• Hierarchical layouts can have multiple roots. In ArcGIS 10, you can set more than one node to be the root of a hierarchical tree.