Hi there,
I have 2 feature classes. Both of them are pipelines. One is fairly reliable (utility) and the other is very unreliable with lots of duplicate, but not coincident linework (eg_line) - see the attached image to get a better sense. I need to derive a single feature class that incorporates both feature classes, but in a "cleaned up" way.
I was playing around with the 'intersect' tool, with a wide tolerance (50 meters), to reduce the eg_line feature class to a single line. That works okay, because the data is crap. That gets rid of single lines though (those without another line within 50-m), so I appended a duplicate set of lines to the same feature class before running it. However, I can't use that tool with more than 1 feature class (i.e., both eg_line and utility) because there are features in one that are not in the other (i.e., some new pipelines in eg_line that are not in utility that will disappear because they don't intersect lines in utility)
I also tried the integrate tool, which also seems to work fairly well, except for one small problem - even if I put a rank 1 on "utility" and a rank 2 on "eg_line", "utility" still gets altered and I want to maintain that linework as is. The integrate tool help says that you can use read-only features in the tool, which would help me push "eg_line" over to "utility" without altering "utility". However, "utility" is not read-only data, and if I compress the data (it's a fgdb feature class), then the integrate tool craps out saying it cant alter that feature class.
So ... a few questions.
1. Is there another way to smash together a bunch of linework that I haven't thought of or don't know (i.e., to get rid of the obviously coincident linework in eg_line)?
2. Is there a way to make a feature class read only?
3. Is there a way, other than ranks, to make sure utility stays as is, and only eg_line is altered to be coincident with utility?
Thanks
Arc9.3
