Add the ability to reconstruct from historic seeds

[MizukiKayano2]

We love the concept of seeds, and regularly use Reconstruct From Seeds as part of our daily parcel maintenance activities to quickly and easily clean and edit parcel features. As part of our maintenance activities and downstream impacts in our system, it is sometimes necessary to perform spatial edits on our Historic parcel features. Currently, it is not possible to rebuild a historic parcel using the build parcel tools or the reconstruct from seeds tool. The current workaround when editing historic features would be to select and reactivate(Set Current) the features (involving some manual updates to attribution as this process counteracts some attribute rules we have in place), proceed with the geometry edits, and deactivate(Set Historic) the features once they have been adjusted. This workaround allows the geometry updates but is not particularly efficient.

We are requesting the addition of functionality to allow parcel fabric users to rebuild a historic parcel from a seed- perhaps a “Reconstruct From Historic Seeds” tool that would have essentially the same functionality as the current reconstruct from seeds tool, but work to rebuild historic parcels based on historic lines. Outside of our own organization’s needs, this tool could also work in general for users who may intentionally or unintentionally shrink historic parcels to seeds and would like a quick tool to resolve this.

[AlexanderCoster]

This would avoid a lengthy workaround which can introduce other errors.

[AmirBar-Maor]

@MizukiKayano2 @AlexanderCoster 

Do your historic parcels always have historic lines forming a closed loop? 

I ask because when you merge parcels, for example, only the shared boundary between the parcels is retired.

Would you expect the Build tool to create missing historic lines and missing historic points? probably not.

Should it use current lines and current points in addition to the historic lines and points?

Or would it make sense to "walk the parcel lineage" back?

[SarahSibbett]

@AmirBar-Maor hmmm, these are very good questions. Mizuki is away on vacation right now, but some other mappers will be reviewing your questions based on their data. 

In my opinion: the 'Regenerate Historic Seeds' tool should use historic lines where they exist around the seed, and if there are 'holes' (i.e., the historic lines do not form a closed loop), then the tool can fill in the holes with active lines. This may be extremely complex to do in an automated fashion, I am not sure. But it would be nice to have a tool for this instead of setting everything to current for a period of time and then setting it back to historic. 

[SeanLyons]

@AmirBar-Maor The parcels would, in most cases, not have a full set of historic lines to form a full closed loop. If the tool made more points that would confuse the issue more since we end up with duplicates which would be bad for us. 

I think the only logical answer would be to walk back through the lineage for that particular record and then build from that since we may have stacks of the same parcel getting remaindered multiple times and the lineage would be the only way to identify which set of lines belongs to which parcel at a point in time. 

[AmirBar-Maor]

Thanks for the input

[Jessica_Watson]

This would be useful for us as well as we have historic information such as linework that we wish to bring into our Parcel Fabric via ETL processes. We have a process to bring in the data but we also have to make the historic data current, build parcels, retire them, and also make sure everything is matched up i.e. historic and current line endpoints align.