With the current 'Validate Topology' geoprocessing tool, there is an option to use the 'visible extent' parameter to validate only the current extent of your data. If I were to create a python script to validate topology, I would still need to execute the script from within ArcMap if I wanted to validate portions of the data at a time (using the visible extent).
The reason I want to be able to validate portions of the topology of a time is because if I were to validate the entire dataset I would exceed the error threshold for topology. The reason I have so many errors is because I am creating a topology to load into a parcel fabric, and my staging data has a significant number of connection lines that must be marked as exceptions.
My ideal is to build the topology and validate it all within a stand alone python script, but with the current Validate Topology tool, I have to run the process from within ArcMap. I think it would be very helpful if instead of a simple "visible extent" checkbox, I could manually specify the extent (either by typing in the coordinates, or by loading a polygon feature class to define the extent). This would make the tool much more robust when being run from a stand alone python script.
