A quick tour of geoprocessing environments
Getting help on a tool's environments
A geoprocessing tool can use any number of environment settings. It is up to the developer of the tool to decide which environment settings will be used by the tool. For system tools developed by ESRI, the tool help will specify which environment settings apply to the tool. To view this information, do the following:
- Click the Show Help >> button to display the tool's help panel.
- In the tool's help panel, click the Tool Help button. This opens the tool's reference page.
The last section of the tool reference page describes which environment settings the tool will use. Each environment setting is a link to the reference help page for the environment.
Environment levels and hierarchy
There are four levels of environment settings:
- Application level settings are the default settings that will be applied to any tool when it is executed.
- Tool level settings are applied to a single run of a tool and override the application level settings.
- Model level settings are specified and saved with a mode and override tool level and application level settings.
- Model process level settings are specified at the model process level, are saved with the model, and override model level settings.
Specifying environment settings
The way you specify environment settings differs for the four levels.
Saving environment settings
Application level settings are saved with your document. You can also save your application level settings to a file for later recall or save them as default settings that will be used for all new documents. You do this through the ArcToolbox window.
Environments in tool parameters
Some tools have parameters that take their default value from the environment. For example, the Clip tool has an optional XY Tolerance parameter whose default value is retrieved from the XY Tolerance environment setting.