Dirty areas created as a result of the reconcile process

This topic applies to ArcEditor and ArcInfo only.

There are a number of scenarios in which reconciliation can result in new dirty areas that did not exist in the parent or child due to cluster processing during the validation process. In the following example, both versions contain polygons that share edges in a topology. A polygon is split in the child version, and the dirty area is validated.

Splitting a polygon deletes the original feature and replaces it with two new ones. When the dirty area is validated, cluster processing introduces new vertices into the shared edges of the adjacent polygons. When the versions are reconciled, all the features that have been modified in the child version—the split polygons and the polygons with new vertices added by cluster processing—are covered by dirty areas.

The following example illustrates why this is necessary. Suppose that new features were created in two versions and the resulting dirty areas were validated, resulting in no errors. In reconciliation, dirty areas must be created so that potential errors introduced by merging the changes from the two versions can be discovered. In this example, features added in Version1 and Version2 overlap each other, which is a violation of the must not overlap rule: