Editing shared geometry

Polygon features often form a continuous fabric and are often coincident with lines. If you are mapping parcels, soils, administrative zones, or land uses, for example, you will frequently need to modify shared edges or polygon borders. For example, you might need to edit the boundary between urban and agricultural land-use zones as development occurs.

To work with shared geometry, you will need to have a map or geodatabase topology on your data. Then you can select edges and nodes that may be shared by more than one feature, modify them, and update all the features that share the node or edge.

Steps:

1. Create either a map topology or a geodatabase topology on your data.
2. Click the Topology Edit tool on the Topology toolbar.
3. Use the Topology Edit tool to select and manipulate the shared edges and nodes. You also can use Reshape Edge to update the shape of the edge or Modify Edge to edit the segments and vertices. When you use the topology editing tools, all the features sharing the edge are updated at the same time.