Using the editing geoprocessing tools

The Editing toolbox contains a set of geoprocessing tools to perform bulk edits to your data. These tools are useful for performing data cleanup, especially on data that was imported from another source, such as CAD.

Effective use of the Editing toolbox geoprocessing tools can improve your productivity because the tools apply edits in bulk, such as to all features or all selected features. In most cases, the similar editing function applies to only one feature at a time.

For example, you have imported some CAD data into a feature class. A typical workflow with these tools might include running Trim Line, Extend Line, or Snap to ensure the lines connect. In fact, you could perform these tasks in a semiautomated manner by running the Editing toolbox geoprocessing tools in a model to fix many of the spatial integrity issues, applying a geodatabase topology with the Must Not Have Dangles rule to find additional lines that do not connect, then using the ArcMap editing tools to address any remaining errors.

Because these tools modify input data rather than creating new output feature classes, you might want to run the tools on a copy of the data to ensure that you are using appropriate tolerance values. This way, you can avoid editing the data beyond the level of cleanup you intended. In addition, if you run the geoprocessing tools during an edit session, you can undo the result.