Editing Shapefile- Feature Construct tool- enabling line.

[RyanHollamby]

This is extremely frustrating in v10, v9.3 I never had a issue doing this. I have a polygon shapefile that I want to digitize lines onto.

I am tracing a landscape feature. The imagery below is turned on and the shapefile contains no fill. I want to simply trace (with line segments because later I want to buffer these lines) the feature and have the edits in the shapefile.

It will only allow me to select Polygon, Rectangle, Circle, Ellipse, Freehand, and Auto Complete Polygon in the construction tools. straight segment is not a option.

What am I missing?

Thanks for the help,
Ryan

[RyanHollamby]

I've been doing more reading about this topic and think I figured it out.

Can you only edit/add poly features to a polygon shapfile (etc. lines to a line shapefile, and points to a point shapefile)?

I guess for some reason i forgot this important detail if it is true.

Thanks, if anyone could agree or disagree it would be great!

[RhondaGlennon]

The construction tools that are listed on the Create Features window are specific to the type of feature template (kind of like the 9.3 target layer, but with more functionality) that is active. If you want to create a polygon (in other words, if you click a polygon feature template), you only see tools to create polygons. If you click a point feature template, you see tools to create points.

When creating a polygon, the Polygon tool behaves somewhat similarly to the former Sketch tool. By default, it creates straight segments. You can use different methods to construct the segments with the Polygon tool by choosing them on the palette on the Editor toolbar, such as if you want to create a curve. The Line tool behaves similarly when creating line features.

Couple of help topics about this:
http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/index.html#/About_creating_segments/001t0000005600...
http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/index.html#/Segment_construction_methods/001t00000...
http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/index.html#/What_s_new_for_editing/00qp00000006000...

But, you are correct, if you want to make a line, you need to put it into a line shapefile. A polygon shapefile can only take polygon features. Whenever you are sketching a polygon, it will always make a polygon and requires at least three segments.

[RyanHollamby]

Thank you. Appreciate your help.

Ryan