Select By Location With Only Boundary Overlap

[tenning]

I'm working with feature layers where I want to dissolve polygons that completely fall within other polygons, but only intersect with the outer polygon by its boundary.

I imagine there's some way of doing this, since the Within Clementini option for Select Layer By Location has almost an opposite effect to what I want, since it excludes features that only share a boundary from my understanding. The within/contains relationships also don't seem to solve this, since it only handles overlap between features from what I can tell. It also isn't enough to use the Intersect relationship, since the polygon needs to be completely surrounded by a single polygon with a certain attribute.

In the screenshot, I selected the polygons that I want to dissolve into the green surrounding polygon. Ideally, the grey and blue polygons would both dissolve into the green polygons.

[DanPatterson]

visual examples under Select Polygon Using Polygon on this page

Select By Location graphic examples—ArcGIS Pro | Documentation

may be useful. 

You may have to do one selection type, then use another method with "add to set" rather than a "new set".

Examine the images to find the one that captures the most cases, then add to it with a continuation "add to set" or start anew

[tenning]

I did look at this before posting and I don't see a scenario that captures my use case. None of the example polygons have holes with another polygon inside like in my case.

[DanPatterson]

from a selection, the only other option is to eliminate a polygon part if it is holes within the selection that you are trying to remove

Eliminate Polygon Part (Data Management)—ArcGIS Pro | Documentation

this tool would eliminate holes from a selection but you would have to deal with the unaffected polygons after with a merge or similar

[tenning]

The issue here is in the selection, not in the dissolving. There are polygons that do not fall within the requirements of removal, such as polygons outside the bounds of the outer polygon. Sure, I can remove the inner polygons or dissolve them into the surrounding one, but I don't know how to go about selecting which ones to remove.

[tenning]

This did spark an idea to a solution where I can extract features for the surrounding polygon's attribute only, fill in holes, merge with original features but don't merge the polygons that would overlap the filled in portions, and reapply my land mask. I was just hoping for a more intuitive approach using the Select Feature By Location tool.

[DanPatterson]

a combination of approaches is often the case

good luck