Clean Tool - Alternative to Topology

BrittanyGale

Hello!

Is there a tool that snaps features together (within a single feature class and based on a snapping tolerance)?

My city's parcels are ridden with gaps and overlap! My boss said he knows of a tool (that at least used to exist) called 'Clean', but I can't find it anywhere. There is a tool called 'Boundary Clean', but it only works for raster data. I want to avoid creating a topology until after this preliminary step is done.

Thank you in advance!

Brittany

RichardFairhurst

Hello!

Is there a tool that snaps features together (within a single feature class and based on a snapping tolerance)?

My city's parcels are ridden with gaps and overlap! My boss said he knows of a tool (that at least used to exist) called 'Clean', but I can't find it anywhere. There is a tool called 'Boundary Clean', but it only works for raster data. I want to avoid creating a topology until after this preliminary step is done.

Thank you in advance!

Brittany

The tool for a polygon feature class that fits what you want to do is the Integrate tool.  This tool can be run on a single feature class.  It modifies the original polygons, so before you use it be sure to back up your original polygon feature class so that if you do not like the results you can start over with other settings.  You can also use it within an edit session, so that you can use the undo changes (but I would still back it up to be safe).  Also, you should probably check the Environment XY Tolerance setting before running this tool.

If you find that certain features need different XY tolerance settings to preserve their integrity you can control the tool by only applying it to a selected set of features.  That way you can adjust the tolerance of feature groups differently.  Some manual snapping may need to take place at the boundaries of two selection sets with different XY tolerance settings, although some careful use of selection sets and tolerance adjustments could minimize that.

Clean was only applicable when coverages were the only way to create shapes.  Coverages are fundamentally different from shapefiles and feature classes, in that they actually encompassed polygons, lines and points in a single data structure and the attribute data was held in an ESRI info database file.  So all polygons could share the same lines and points more easily.  Coverages suffer from a number of limitations, so they could not scale to the same number of features as modern feature classes and they could not support overlapping feature classes except in special types called Regions (assemblages of polygons).

To convert or use coverages you have to have ArcInfo Workstation installed and the related maintenance tools require a Standard (ArcEditor) or Advanced (ArcInfo) license, not a Basic (ArcView) license.  If your polygons features class is non-overlapping you potentially could convert it to a coverage and use the clean process or the clean tool.