Editing overview
What is editing?
With the ArcGIS Runtime SDK for Java you can develop lightweight, focused mapping applications that let users edit geographic data. The SDK includes both fine-grained editing methods as well as coarser-grained user interface components that help you rapidly add and enhance editing functionality in your applications. As the designer or developer of a custom desktop application you have complete control over how simple or how complex an editing experience you expose to your users.
Editing data means that you can add, move, delete, cut, union, and reshape features that exist in geodatabases, whether those geodatabases are local to the machine the application is running on or whether it is on a remote server somewhere. You can also edit the feature's attributes.
For some editing workflows, it's a good idea to have an analyst using ArcGIS for Desktop periodically review the edits to verify data integrity. Although components in the API can perform some data validation, other tasks such as validating topologies cannot be performed.
Feature services
Feature services provide the feature layers required for editing. The feature layers allow you to edit each feature's geometry and attributes. Explore Editing feature layers for more information on feature services and feature layers.
Editing programming models
You can program editing capabilities into your applications in two ways: using the API directly, or using the editing toolkit components. For more fine-grained control of the editing experience, developers can perform editing using the API, using methods directly on the feature layers in the map. For easier and more rapid development, developers can perform editing using the toolkit, taking advantage of the out-of-the-box Swing components that abstract away the fine-grained methods.
Edit tracking
The editing framework supports the tracking of specific edits to features. This happens by keeping track of the following four feature properties:
- which user created the feature
- the date and time the feature was created
- which user was the last editor
- the date and time the last edit took place
Please see edit tracking for more information.