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I've been working with a map that looks something like this:

enter image description here

Wherever two polygons of different types (shown above with different colors) meet there needs to be a thick dashed line between them. The solution so far has been to keep a separate feature class for the lines, which of course needs to be updated every time the polygons change. This has gotten to be pretty tedious and is creating a lot of redundancy in our data. Is there any type of map layer that could render the lines on the fly based on spatial relationships and attribute data? I'm guessing a geometric network would be involved - does anyone have any insights?

EDIT: Sorry everybody, I made a mistake with the screenshot and accidentally had another layer on. The polys are already dissolved to begin with. Please see above for a new version.

bertday
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  • Are you knowledgeable in ArcPy or ArcObjects? – Conor Nov 13 '13 at 18:49
  • I've used ArcPy quite a bit, is there a solution there? – bertday Nov 13 '13 at 19:12
  • Have you looked into Symbol Levels? No coding required. – evv_gis Nov 13 '13 at 21:43
  • I think this would be fine as a Comment rather than as an Answer. Symbol Levels are often overlooked and worth investigating although I don't think they will be useful in meeting this requiremet. – PolyGeo Nov 13 '13 at 22:16
  • @PolyGeo - While I agree that Symbol Levels are looked over quite too often, in regards to the question above, this is perhaps the most efficient solution if you are only wanting to edit the symbology. If you rather have a separate file (which Mapbert clearly states can be tedious to keep up), then simply Dissolving the data will produce a polygon feature class that can be styled to meet such criteria. My response provides an answer to, "does anyone have any insights?", and therefore IMO is an answer. – evv_gis Nov 13 '13 at 22:35
  • related: arcgis - How to hide "internal" polygon boundaries? – matt wilkie Nov 13 '13 at 22:40
  • @ew_gis, I converted your answer to a comment because as it stood it was a link-only answer, which are generally not very useful in the long term. Your further comment, beginning to describe how one might prepare data to usefully use Symbol Levels for the OP's use-case begins to change that. I encourage you to flesh out the idea. – matt wilkie Nov 13 '13 at 22:44
  • @evv_gis If you described the steps that Mapbert could use to meet his requirement using Symbol Levels then that would be an Answer that I would vote for. In general, when I see a question mark in an Answer, my first thought is "Shouldn't this be a Question or a Comment?". I've used Symbol Levels a bit and am keen to be shown that they provide a viable solution to the requirement described in this Question. – PolyGeo Nov 13 '13 at 22:46
  • @mattwilkie and PolyGeo - In most cases, I would provide a step-by-step process for answering the problem. However, since Esri went ahead and did that, I honestly thought just providing the link would suffice. I could have been more descriptive in the hyperlink; rather than saying "Symbol Levels", I could have said "Step-by-step process for dissolving polygon boundaries using symbol level drawing in ArcGIS". I do see where that would have been a more legitiment response. I will keep that in mind for further responses. – evv_gis Nov 13 '13 at 22:54
  • OP, is your data such that your polygons will always exactly overlap where you would like to draw your dashed lines? I have looked into this further and there are possible ArcObjects solutions (not ArcPy) if this is the case. – Conor Nov 13 '13 at 23:57
  • @Conor, the polygons are adjacent but don't generally overlap. I'm not very familiar with ArcObjects but what does it entail? – bertday Nov 14 '13 at 00:10
  • @evv_gis I'm looking into Symbol Levels, this might a good workaround. The only problem is I can't get the Join checkbox to appear... I'll keep trying. – bertday Nov 14 '13 at 00:11
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    I think the difficult to do part of this Question is to draw only part of your polygon boundary using the green dashed symbol. If it were just about dissolving out internal boundaries of adjacent polygons with a common field value then it would be much easier. You may want to try this one on Ask A Cartographer but that site is currently being upgraded. I suspect an Advanced license and the Polygon To Line tool would help here. – PolyGeo Nov 14 '13 at 09:22
  • I am curious as to whether you were able to get this to work. If so, are you able to write it up as an Answer? If not, and you need more help, are you able to edit your Question to revise it with your learnings so far? – PolyGeo Apr 07 '14 at 06:51

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