Setting drawing layer visibility

CAD drawing layers are layers that exist in the source CAD drawing. When you add CAD data to a map document, layer settings in the CAD file determine their default visibility in ArcMap. You can change these settings in the Layer Properties dialog box and save them as properties of the feature layer.

To open the dialog box, double-click the CAD feature layer in the table of contents, or right-click the layer and click Properties on the context menu.

Note:

Turning off a drawing layer suppresses the display of the data but does not prevent it from being input to a geoprocessing tool.

Drawing layers tab

Each CAD feature layer maintains its own collection of visibility settings in the Drawing Layers tab. You can set them differently across multiple feature layers in the same map (.mxd) document.

Drawing layer setting in the CAD file	Default visibility in ArcMap
On	Visible
Locked	Visible
Off	Not visible
Frozen	Not visible

Set all drawing layers visible

Click Enable All to set all drawings layers visible in the feature layer.

Turn off all drawing layers

Click Disable All to turn off all drawing layers in the feature layer.

Restore the original settings

Click Restore Original to set visibility to the layer settings in the CAD file.

Restore the last settings

Click Restore Last to reset the visibility settings back to when OK or Apply was last clicked.

Apply the settings to all feature layers

Click Apply to Dataset to apply the current settings to all feature layers in the map document containing CAD features from this dataset.