Project Section

This section allows you to:

1. See the list of existing Pathfinder projects in your ArcGIS document.

2. Create a new Pathfinder project based on the current ArcGIS document.

3. Edit and upload the project content:

   • Add or remove layers added to a Pathfinder project.

   • Update the layer data in Pathfinder, if it has been changed in ArcGIS.

   • Change the number and width of the layer rings (influence areas).

4. Delete a Pathfinder project.

5. Edit the Start and End points of the project, for routing calculations.

6. Download a Pathfinder project from the cloud, its data, scenarios and results.

Note

Multiple Pathfinder projects can be created in the same ArcGIS Map or Map 3D, for different areas. If you need to study different constraints or Start/End points options in the same area, create a single project with different scenarios.

Create project

To create a project, use the New Project button in the Project section.

A dialog opens to set some options.

The options to generate a Pathfinder project are:

• Name: user-given name. Since multiple projects can be created in the same ArcGIS Map, this name may be different from the Map name.

• Description: text to identify or describe the Pathfinder project.

• Area: the region where the simulations will be performed.

• Start and End points: the points used to calculate routes. They can also be added or modified in the Scenarios.

• Resolution: the spatial accuracy of the calculations. Its default value is 10 meters. It may be necessary to increase this value for very large areas. An error message will appear if the resolution must be increased.

The name, area, and resolution fields are mandatory.

The project area, start and end points can be defined from ArcGIS layers, data files or drawn manually when the user creates the project.

Note

The project area and the project resolution cannot be changed once the project is created. Just delete the project and create it again. The start and end points can be changed with the Edit Project Points button or defined in the Scenario Settings.

To draw start/end points or the project area, select the Draw option and click on the right Draw button. Then click on the map and edit the project area or selected point.

Note

Each Pathfinder project created in the ArcGIS Pro addin is stored in Pathfinder cloud and can be accessed from Pathfinder Web, as well as downloaded by users of your organization with access to it.

Edit project

To edit a Pathfinder project, first the user must select the it in the Active Project list, in the Pathfinder tab.

Then, click the Edit Project button to open the Project Content pane.

In this pane, the user can add, delete or rewrite layers in the Pathfinder project. The layers present in the ArcGIS document will be displayed, as shown in the image below, in two separate tables for vector and raster data.

Possible operations in this pane are:

• Add layers. To include them in the Pathfinder project, the Include option must be checked. It is possible to include all the layers in the list by clicking Include all button.

• Remove layers that are already in the Pathfinder project, by unchecking the Include option.

• Rewrite layers. If the user has changed an ArcGIS layer included in the Pathfinder project (the geometry has been edited, or features have been added or deleted), we can update it by checking the Rewrite option.

• Define the rings or buffers of each vector layer. Users can create multiple influence areas or rings around the original feature, so different resistance values can be assigned to each ring. By default, vector layers have only one ring. To generate more, click the Add ring button and change their default ring width value of 0 to a larger one.

For instance, this image shows how to create three rings for the Power lines layer. The first ring has a width of 10m, the second ring has a width of 100m and the third ring is 50m wide.

After all the options are set, click on Apply changes to apply them to the Pathfinder project. The Status log list will show when the process is done.

Multiple steps are performed during this apply process, including exporting layers’ data (within the project area), uploading them to Pathfinder, and calculating the ring geometries.

Note

The time required to complete this process can be long. Please be patient.

The maximum size for raster data is 200MB. If a raster’s size in the project area is larger, it will be resampled to reduce it.

Complex vector layers may need a long time to be processed, and they may fail to be loaded into Pathfinder. Consider spliting them by area or by attribute.

Adding and removing layers in ArcGIS

When layers are added or removed to the ArcGIS map, the list of layers in the Pathfinder panels is automatically refreshed. New layers in the map are not automatically added to the Pathfinder project, you need to select them in the Edit panel.

When a layer is removed from the ArcGIS map and it was used in the Pathfinder project, you will be prompted to choose whether to delete it from Pathfinder cloud or not. If you created the Pathfinder project from ArcGIS, this may make sense. However, if this layer was downloaded from Pathfinder cloud, it is safer to keep it in the server.

Edit project points

After the project creation, it is possible to change the start and end points in the Pathfinder project. In the Project section, click on the Edit Project Points button.

The options to specify the points are 1) to draw the new location point or 2) to select a new layer containing a point feature.

The procedure to draw the points is the same as when creating the project: select the draw option and then click on the right button with the pencil icon, then draw the point on the map.

Delete project

If the Pathfinder project is not needed any more, it can be eliminated by using the Delete project button.

Note that there are two independent elements that can be deleted in this operation. First, there is the local project configuration in your ArcGIS. Removing this configuration just disconnects your ArcGIS from the Pathfinder cloud project, but it doesn’t remove any data in the cloud, and it neither removes any data in your ArcGIS document.

You must confirm this local configuration removal with the following message box:

The second component is the Pathfinder project itself in the cloud. If you remove this, you will release space in our Pathfinder account to create other projects, but all layer, scenario and results data will be removed from the cloud storage, so it is highly recommended that you save local copies of all this information.

The following message will appear for you to confirm the removal of the cloud project. If you are unsure, it recommended to select “Yes” to keep the project.

Note

Deleting a Pathfinder project does not affect the content of the ArcGIS Pro document. No layers will be removed.

Access the project on the web

Users can open the project in the Pathfinder web site to access functionalities only available online, like the Printed Report or the 3D visualization.

To access the project online, go to Pathfinder and enter your username and password in the login page.

Once logged in, you will see all the projects created in your Pathfinder account. The projects created from the ArcGIS add-in will have an ArcGIS_Pro_ prefix followed by the user-given project name.

To open a project, just click on the tile with its name.

Note

The changes done to a project on the Web are not automatically synchronized with the addin. In general, it is not recommended to change the content of the project (add/remove layers or modify parameters) in the Pathfinder web application.

If you change project data, scenarios or results on the Web application, and want to update the addin, use the “Copy from cloud” tool below.

Copy project data from the cloud

There are a few reasons why you may need to copy Pathfinder projects from the cloud into your ArcGIS Pro document:

• You have lost your ArcGIS document with the Pathfinder project. In this case, the Pathfinder cloud works as a backup that you can use to recover your project in ArcGIS. Note, though, that only the latest results are kept in the cloud. You will not be able to recover results that were recalculated again unless you have copied them elsewhere.

• Someone made changes to the Pathfinder project in the Web application and you need to apply those changes to your ArcGIS version. If anyone used the Web application to add new layers or modified the buffer settings of the project, or you changed the resistance and other parameters of one of your scenarios (scenarios are always owned by their creators), you can apply those changes to your ArcGIS project.

• As a colaborative tool, to share with others ArcGIS users a Pathfinder project you created. If other ArcGIS users in your company have a Pathfinder account with access to your project, they can use this functionality to create their own local copy of the project data. Then, they will be able to create their own scenarios and results.

Note

This functionality must be used carefully. It is your responsibilty to maintain consistancy between the ArcGIS and cloud versions of the project, and avoid multiple users with admin permissions to change the same project, unless you are all careful. It is recommended that the project layers and configuration are managed by a single person. Scenarios are not a problem in this regard, because they are always managed by the user who created them, and each user manages different scenarios in the same project.

Note

Pathfinder permissions apply to which projects you will be able to see and copy their data. Scenarios and results are private to each user, so you will only be able to copy those you created with the same user you are logged in the Addin. In the future, we will support accessing shared scenarios as well.

If you want to copy project data from a cloud project to ArcGIS, use the “From cloud” tool in the Project section:

A dialog will open to select the source project and which of its components will be copied.

Select the source project and scenario

The Copy From Project dialog will access the list of all projects available to the logged in user. You can type some text to filter the list:

After selecting the project, the scenarios defined in it by your user will be listed. As in Pathfinder web, you can only access scenarios created by your user. Shared scenarios are not yet supported in the addin.

Scenario selection does not affect the layer data download, but it will be used if you select to download a scenario configuration, or its results.

Copying project and layers

The first option in the dialog is to copy the project data.

Like the others in the dialog, this option is not mandatory. You should use it when you want to:

• Get a local copy of the project layers’ geodata.

• Get the layer configuration (list of layers in the project and their rings) so you can change it from ArcGIS.

• Get scenario information, if you didn’t already have a local copy of the project.

When this option is selected and the OK button is clicked, the following actions happen:

• The basic project properties (extent, start and end points, name and description) are copied to your ArcGIS.

  A confirmation dialog appears:

  

  The map view zooms to the project extent, and its area and start/end points are displayed as graphics. A new “Pathfinder graphics” layer is created containing these graphic elements.

  

• The project layers are copied.

  The vector or raster data of the layers in the Pathfinder project will be downloaded and added to your ArcGIS document. This may take some time, depending on the data complexity.

  A dialog will show the list of layers that were successfully copied:

  

  In some cases, long layers names will need to be clipped to comply with ArcGIS geoprocessing limits. A dialog will show how the original names have been shortened:

  

  If the data download fails for some layers, a dialog will open to list them:

  

  In the list of failed layers, you will see the error messages explaining what happened. In most case, the reason will be that the layer is empty in Pathfinder (it doesn’t contain any data in the project area).

• Group layers are created for each category in the Pathfinder project. So, the downloaded layers will be added to groups reflecting the category classification in the original Pathfinder project.

  

Where are the downloaded data stored?

• The raster data, and vector data in some cases, are stored as GeoTIFF and shape files in the project folder, inside a “Pathfinder Results / layers” subfolder.

• Most of the vector data will be stored directly in the project’s default geodatabase.

Note

The added layers will be displayed with ArcGIS’ default symbology. In the current version, the original Pathfinder symbology is not applied.

Note

If your Pathfinder project was already defined in the ArcGIS document, the existing layers will not be overwritten. Only new layers will be downloaded and created in ArcGIS. If you want to refresh the data of some layer from the cloud’s original ones, first remove them from the ArcGIS project without removing them from Pathfinder cloud.

Copying scenarios

As mentioned, a scenario can be selected from the dropdown in the dialog. Only one scenario can be copied at a time, but you can use the tool multiple times to copy more scenarios as needed.

If you want to copy one scenario, select this checkbox.

To apply the resistances defined in the scenario, you should have the corresponding layers already in your ArcGIS document. If you don’t, select also the checkbox to copy the project data.

If the scenario is already defined in ArcGIS, you will be prompted to confirm your wish to overwrite it.

Once the scenario is copied, you will see a confirmation as well:

If some of the scenario layers are not present in your project (they were not downloaded correctly, or have been removed), a dialog will show that some layer configurations from the scenario could not be copied:

After the scenario is copied, the Resistances pane for the scenario will open, and it will be shown in the Scenario section of the Pathfinder tab.

From this moment, you can apply changes to your Pathfinder project scenario from ArcGIS.

Downloading results

You can also download the results (Resistance Map, Corridor raster and Paths) from a selected cloud project scenario.

If the results haven’t been calculated yet, you will see a notification message. Otherwise, the resistance map, corridor map and path(s) already computed in Pathfinder cloud for the selected scenario will be downloaded to ArcGIS and added as layers to the map.

As mentioned, data downloaded from Pathfinder, including these results, will be displayed with default symbols:

You can then use ArcGIS symbology options to change the visualization the results as you prefer:

Same as if you generate the results locally, the corresponding files will be stored in a subfolder within your ArcGIS project folder: “Results/MyScenarioName”:

Add layers to an existing project in the cloud

We use this tool when we want to upload ArcGIS layers to an existing Pathfinder project in the cloud without first downloading that project to ArcGIS. The requirements to use it are:

• Authorization: to upload layers to an existing cloud project, the user must belong to the company owning the project and have administrator-level permissions.

• Data: the layers must be already present in the Contents of the ArcGIS Pro map.

You can find this tool in the Project section:

A dialog box will open to select one of the projects from your company. To filter the list of projects, type some text.

Once the project is selected, all the layers in the ArcGIS map intersecting its area will be listed.

Now, choose all the layers to be uploaded to the Pathfinder cloud project by clicking on their names.

When the layers are selected, click the OK button. The uploading will start and the status log list will show the running process.

As soon as the process is complete, a confirmation dialog will appear:

Afterwards, the new layers will appear in Pathfinder Web as part of the project and all authorized users will be able to use them in their scenarios.

Note

The time required to complete the uploading process depends on the layers size. Please be patient.

Complex vector layers may need a long time to be processed. Sometimes this process fails. Try again or consider splitting them in multiple layers by area (clipping) or by attribute values (e.g. different types of buildings).

Large raster data (small cell size in a large area) may be downsampled to fit with Pathfinder’s data upload limit (currently 200MB).

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Disclaimer: the scenarios depicted in this manual do not represent actual customer projects or infrastructure proposals, and are presented for demonstration purposes only.

For more help, please contact Gilytics.