There are many ways that the Bentley’s Haestad hydraulics and hydrology products can help ease the use of working interactively with ArcGIS. Below are the three most commonly used ways a user should be familiar with.
1. Creating shapefiles from flextables for elements.
Any element that’s present in your model can be exported to shapefile from the flextable with any properties you choose.
I’ve used this feature many times to create geodatabases to work in ArcMap. It provides an easy solution to creating shapefiles or feature classes to work within ArcGIS when you don’t have a need to open your entire model.
2. Updating a model using ModelBuilder
Modelbuilder allows a user to leverage the use of a shapefile, ArcGIS geodatabase file, excel shapefile, etc… to build your model and keep it up to date.
ModelBuilder also allows a user to work quickly and easily over time by storing the information in the ModelBuilder manager window in the project being worked on or allows the ModelBuilder run to be export/imported from an .mbc (ModelBuilder connection file). It also has the ability to “sync in” and “sync out” information to your shapefile, Excel file, ArcGIS geodatabase file etc… that it’s connected to with the click of a button.
ModelBuilder is a tool that I use on a weekly basis during my troubleshooting process. It provides a fast way to create models and update elements in bulk. This can also be used in conjunction with the creating shapefiles from flextables tool after you’ve made changes to the shapefile in ArcMap.
3. GIS-IDs
a. GIS-IDs can link the hydrology and hydraulics model to the shapefile or Geodatabase file in ModelBuilder. They allow the elements to be linked on a one-to one, one-to-many, or many-to-one level. Without getting into the specifics of the GIS-IDs, which can be read about more in the help documentation of the software, they are a unique identifier field that will link elements in the GIS database and model file to make building and maintaining your model file easier.
There is more information found on GIS-ID's in the help documentation of the products.
Although WaterGEMS, SewerGEMS, and HAMMER are the only products that integrate with ArcMap, these tools can also be found in all the other hydraulics and hydrology products too.