Does Select Layer by Location affect other users of a shared feature class?

[DavidSchuster]

Hello!

I have a task of finding and exporting any lines in feature class A that are within a certain distance of lines in feature class B.  This needs to be done in a ModelBuilder tool that will eventually be published to our ArcGIS server as a geoprocessing task. 

Select Layer By Location seems to work for this purpose, however I understand that it is essentially creating a temporary selection on an existing feature class, and not creating a new feature class (in other words, there is no parameter for Output Feature Class in this tool).

My question is, if I were to run Select Layer By Location against a feature class that is being read by other users or geoprocessing task processes, will my selection in any way affect those other users/processes?  Is there any chance that their results might be limited to my Select Layer By Location filter?   I have feature classes stored in SQL Server (SDE) and in file geodatabases on a network share that are used by many other users and processes.

Or, is there a better geoprocessing tool for this problem that I should use instead?  Something that does a spatial query and simply exports the results instead of doing a selection? 

Thank you!

David

[JohannesLindner]

tl;dr: No, it won't affect the featureclass.

There's a big difference between a Featureclass/Shapefile and a Layer.

The featureclass is the data that resides in your database.

A layer ist a local representation of this data. It doesn't have any data itself, it points to the featureclass's data. And with a layer, you can change how to present this data (symbols, labels, popups, filters, etc.)

You can't do selections on featureclasses, only on layers. Select Layer(!) By Location affects the layer's selection, the underlying data is not changed in any way.

It behaves the same way as manual selection does. If you manually select a feature, you change your local representation of the data (the layer), not the data itself. The selection does not get passed on to other users, it only happens in your local map.

[DavidSchuster]

Thanks for confirming, Johannes!