Defining area of interest rules

This topic applies to ArcEditor and ArcInfo only.

What is the area of interest?

The area of interest (AOI) is the geographic extent of your job. This helps confine the unit of work to a geographic area. It also helps managers and users track where edits are in progress to avoid conflicts and prioritize and coordinate activities among many users and user groups. The AOIs for all jobs are stored in a special feature class in the database maintained by Workflow Manager. ArcGIS Workflow Manager provides tools to allow you to define the AOI.

ArcGIS Workflow Manager provides you with rules that govern what your users can do with and/or within the AOI. These rules can be configured through Workflow Manager System Settings.

Area of interest rules

AOI overlapping rules

You can determine if you want your areas of interest for your jobs to overlap at all or restrict it based on job types.

Steps:

1. Open Workflow Manager Administrator and connect to your default database.
2. Right-click and click Workflow Manager System Settings.
3. On the Workflow Manager System Settings dialog box, click the Area of Interest tab.
4. Choose how you want the application to function when your users are defining an AOI for their jobs:

   • Allow—This option allows you to have overlapping areas of interest within your repository.
   • Disallow—This option prevents you from having overlapping areas of interest within your repository. With this option enabled, the application prompts users with a message that the AOI is overlapping another job's AOI.
   • Disallow by Job Type—This option prevents you from having overlapping areas of interest for jobs of the same type within your repository. With this option enabled, the application prompts users with a message that the AOI is overlapping another job's AOI.

5. Click OK on the Workflow Manager System Settingsdialog box.

AOI edit extension rules

You can determine if you want your users to be able to select features or edit features that are in proximity to or within the job's area of interest.

Steps:

1. Open Workflow Manager Administrator and connect to your default database.
2. Right-click and click Workflow Manager System Settings.
3. On the Workflow Manager System Settings dialog box, click the Area of Interest tab.
4. Choose how you want the application to function when your users are executing a job that has an area of Interest:

   • Warn users when selecting features—This option warns your users that they are selecting features outside the job's AOI. The message box presents options to zoom to selection, clear selection, draw the AOI, or close the message. If you close the warning, you can continue with the actions.
   • Prevent users from selecting features—The features a user selects outside the bounds of the job's area of interest are immediately unselected with no warning. Any features selected during the selection that do intersect with the AOI remain selected. Features that are created outside the AOI with this option are deleted. In this case, the user is presented with a message that the new feature will be deleted.
   • Allow edits to features—This option disables any of the rules, so users can select and edit features outside the job's AOI. This option is selected by default.

5. Choose the operator on how you want the rules above to be applied:

   • Outside—This applies the rules above to edit operations happening to features that are within the job's area of interest and also features that touch the AOI.
   • Completely Outside—This applies the rules above to edit operations happening to features that are entirely outside the job's area of interest. This operator ignores features that touch the AOI boundary; these features are considered to be within the AOI.

Workflow Manager System SettingsUsing Area of Interest (AOI)

Note:

If the job does not have an area of interest, the edit extension will be ignored and you will be able to select and edit any features in the current edit session.