About creating schematic feature classes

Schematic feature classes hold the common properties of a set of schematic features in a schematic dataset. The Schematic Dataset Editor utility provides four different functions to create schematic feature classes:

• The New Schematic Feature Class command allows you to create any new schematic feature class starting from scratch. This command is often the one used to create a schematic feature class that will be populated by a custom query.
• The Import From Feature Layers command allows creating schematic feature classes in a very advanced phase starting from all or part of the feature layers stored in any Map, Map Template, or Layer file. The created schematic feature classes are automatically associated with the GIS feature classes related to the feature layers input during the process. It is a very powerful function that also fixes the default schematic layer properties at the same time. This command is generally used when you want to configure a schematic diagram template to generate diagrams that are going to be completely or partially based on GIS features.
• The Import From Feature Classes/Object Tables command is another function in which impacts are quite similar to those obtained when using the Import From Feature Layers function. It allows you to easily create the schematic feature class(es) associated with one or several GIS feature classes or object tables and automatically associates it (them) with your schematic diagram template at the same time. The main difference with the Import From Feature Layers function concerns the layer properties. Since this function works from feature classes or object tables, layer properties are not configured for the diagram template at the end of the Import From Feature Classes/Object Tables process. This function may be useful when configuring schematic diagram templates based on any schematic builder.
• Activating the Automatic schematic feature classes creation option on the schematic builder properties page is another way to create schematic feature classes. This option is available for any predefined schematic builder from its builder properties page. When this option is checked, new schematic feature classes can be automatically created to manage input data for which no schematic feature class already exists in the schematic dataset.